Corto Maltese - Under the Sign of Capricorn

Corto Maltese is a lanky, hard-as-nails comic strip antihero, a sailor born from a gypsy mother and a father who, also, was a sailor. Corto grew up in the Jewish quarter in Cordoba, Spain, where, discovering he had no lifeline on his palm, he carved one for himself, like a jagged, bloody, and mysterious road into the tender flesh that would see so many black-and-white comic strip adventures.

Corto Maltese is the creation of super genius Italian cartoonist Hugo Pratt, and he's generally heralded along with such comics luminaries as Héctor Germán Oesterheld (author of Mort Cinder and The Ethernaut, with whom Pratt worked, and who was "disappeared" by the Argentine government in 1977), Caniff, Neal Adams, Basil Wolverton—you get the picture.

Corto is a hard-bitten, cynical, not to say surly character who will not, I repeat, WILL NOT hesitate to kick your ass or cut your throat. He's movie-star handsome (what a shocker) with heavy dark brows, long sideburns, a yachting cap, and a ring dangling from his ear. He always looks to be squinting and carries a perpetual thin-lipped, sardonic smile. He seems imperturbable.

He's met everyone from Jack London to Rasputin, Butch Cassidy to Uncle Joe Stalin. His favorite book is Utopia by Thomas More, which he is perpetually reading but never gets to the end of. He quotes Rimbaud, but I already somewhat knew that by just looking at him. It was just sort of an instinctive look, that he would be an admirer of my Little Arthur.

As a sailor through the sun-baked Pacific Islands, he can come across as a hardened, callous rogue, and he's definitely not someone to mess with. His adventures are multi-faceted affairs, with hints of espionage, piracy, and enough pulp adventure derring-do and shoot-'em-ups to fill several issues of any crumbling old rag. He's hardboiled, to put it bluntly. He could knock back spiced rum with Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe lying on a beach in sunny L.A., watching the tide come in and out. And all of those gents would get along like "merry rogues" (to borrow from this book).

This book, Under the Sign of Capricorn, published in 1971, seems to be a collection of several storylines instead of a graphic novel proper. Corto gets tangled up with young Tristan Bantam, a freckle-faced young boy whose father discovered Lemuria, and whose sister is a telepathic witch. He almost gets assassinated by a one-armed killer under the employ of a crooked lawyer who wants to lay hands on his estate, but Corto steps in and regulates and they all set sail for Brazil, where Morgana, Bantam's beautiful black sister, is located while she reads tarot.

There is a mystical dream sequence where Bantam learns he's been reincarnated several lifetimes and stands at the dimensional portal to Lemuria with Quetzalcoatl or some such—there are hints and whispers of otherworld and occult forces throughout. There are also pulp fiction beauties, gorgeous women who love Corto Maltese and who challenge the racial dynamics of 1971 by being loved by him in return. Dig me?

The first tale somehow morphs into a treasure hunt with four Aces carved from whalebone, and a search of a desert isle for a treasure hidden by Edward "Blackbeard" Teach. Everything has a surreal, Fellini-esque undercurrent to it, but the weird, dream-like narratives of Corto's adventures in no way detract from the enjoyment and interest they engender.

The artwork is beautiful, clear, easy-to-comprehend old-style Sunday strip art of the Modesty Blaise variety. Nothing here is visually confusing, although the composition can seem a bit stiff in places. The last story is the most dreamlike and surreal of all, detailing a narrative wherein Corto is rendered with amnesia, saves the skins of a notorious family, and once again meets up with the drunken professor, Steiner, while commenting on the fact that his life and adventures are observed by the passing of a seagull, which lends it a poetic symbolism. Perhaps Rimbaud would have appreciated it.

It is observed by the gulls, and the Reader, who will want to set sail with Corto Maltese after reading this slim volume, on future fathomless voyages.

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