The Man From Venice

Interview published in The Comics Journal #169, July 1994

Born in Venice in 1927, Hugo Pratt is probably the last classic adventure cartoonist alive today.

As the American adventure strips that inspired Pratt in his youth degenerated and died out, he revitalized them in Europe and South America by drawing or creating a variety of strips which matched, if not surpassed, his models. The most famous of these strips are, of course, the classic Corto Maltese stories (TCJ # 108 published an excerpt of “The Brazilian Eagle”). But Pratt did not mysteriously spring out of nowhere; Corto Maltese was the culmination of a long apprenticeship where Pratt was only one of a number of artists, and Corto only one of many series, mostly unknown in the U.S., that influenced one another.

In this interview, conducted by Graziano Origa at Pratt’s home near Lausanne, Switzerland in 1993, the artist chats about his influences and his colleagues.

GRAZIANO ORIGA: Is it reasonable to say that Hugo Pratt basically always does the same comic, sort of like Fellini always makes the same movie?

HUGO PRATT: No, I don’t think that’s true. Maybe that impression comes from the fact that my characters often meet, and move from one story to the next. We find Lt. Tenton of the Desert Scorpions again in Jungle Ann and in Corto Maltese. It’s like playing a giant game of chess. A lesson I was taught by Milton Caniff; he also often moved his pawns about -- the Dragon Lady and Burma met and they became important as a result.

ORIGA: You often come back to Caniff in your conversation. Do you consider him your great teacher?

PRATT: I’m always talking about Caniff because of his extraordinary stylishness. He revolutionized comics.

ORIGA: Apart from Caniff, what other artists have influenced you?

PRATT: Lyman Young, of Tim Tyler’s Luck. Young was a great African adventure storyteller and he made two generations dream. He drew the most beautiful women in the history of comics -- like Lorilla or Queen Loana. They had personality, they had style, and they were very sexy. As a kid in ’35, before I left for Ethiopia, I read L’Avventuroso which published another great artist that few remember: that was Will Gould, author of Red Barry and Bob Star. It may have been him who gave me the desire to draw. Gould’s art was unrivaled in its dynamism and modernism.
    Once, he wrote an introduction to one of my things. After seeing my art he sent me a letter, where he said that to him, it was like a boxer looking for the knock-out punch. He said, “I see, Mr. Pratt, that you’re not afraid to dip a pen or brush in a bottle of ink and throw down a velvet-black line with the same confidence as a boxer launching his attack.” That was a nice compliment! The comparison with a boxer was to the point. I’ve kept that letter and I cherish it.
    Gould died drunk, smoking a cigarette in bed. I’d looked for him, and I’d paid for his trip from America to the Lucca Salon, but on the phone, he asked me, “Who’s going to pay my trip from California to New York?” At which I thought, “Man! He’s really a beggar!”
    But he was one of the true masters, one of those who gave an aristocratic elegance to comics. Like Alex Raymond, who, whith Flash Gordon, turned boys’ worlds upside down, making them dream of cloud cities.

ORIGA: And before them?

PRATT: Before them we must go back to Art Nouveau, to a great artist like Windsor McCay. His Little Nemo, dreaming, winds up in incredible worlds with giant flowers. He would get lost in a vase of daisies, and these daisies would become a jungle.

ORIGA: You’re always quoting American authors.

PRATT: Yes. Looking at the Americans, we often forget to point out that Americans have borrowed from us Europeans, from our architecture, our poetry, our painting. If we wonder where Alex Raymond found a certain architecture, a certain design, we discover that he looked at the spires of Gaudi, the architect of the Barcelona cathedral who was never able to finish its façade. Not to mention the Impressionists, from whom the Japanese have taken so much.

ORIGA: Who are your Italian colleagues whom you’ve been closest to or whom you admire?

PRATT: There are so many good ones. I’m grateful to Mario Faustinelli because he’s the one who gave me the chance to be an artist. Then I should mention Dino Battaglia, who was a poet of drawing. Also skilful was Grazia Nidasio, who was ahead of everyone else when she invented Valentina Mela Verde [Valentina Green Apple]. She had a very elegant style, and her characters were delightful. I cherish my memories of her; I always thought of her as a good working pal.

ORIGA: Dino Battaglia and Grazia Nidasio. Those names take us back to the Corriere dei Piccoli in the ’60s.

PRATT: Yes, I was just back from Argentina. I remember that I went to the Corriere, and presented myself to Carlo Triberti. Triberti wasn’t fit to be an art director, he didn’t have the guts to make any changes. He remembered the Corriere dei Piccoli as it was in his childhood, and wanted to redo it that way. He looked at my pages, smoking his pipe, and said “I’ll see what we can do.” I instantly realized that he didn’t like them at all. Then I went to Gian Carlo Francesconi, who was the chief editor. Francesconi struck me as a modern guy; he was young, just a little freaky, with a long beard. “Look,” I told him, “I need work, but those guys in the other office are killing me... Can you give me a hand?” He started to laugh and said “O.K., I’ll see to it.” And he gave me work. There are people who help you in life. I’ve been given a helping hand, and that’s why I feel it’s my duty to help younger artists.

ORIGA: You had to fight further battles at the Corriere dei Piccoli.

PRATT: Yes, I’m a real fighter. But I often ended up empty-handed. Once there was a kind of insurrection at the Corriere della Sera, because they wanted us to sign a fraudulent contract. I didn’t go along, while all the others signed. The only one who sided with me was Iris De Paoli. She was a great fighter, Iris De Paoli. She was an Argentine, and was very good at her little comic-strip theaters; they were a little commedia dell’arte in comics form.

ORIGA: In those years you did a great historical comic: Fanfulla’s Adventures.

PRATT: Fanfulla is important because it was a change in my style. I’d adopted a much freer drawing style, compared to before. I remember that some colleagues from the Corriere dei Piccoli went to Triberti to complain that I was working too fast. I had to do something on Florence, and the town, according to them, wasn’t really seen. I had drawn three cypresses and a lane leading to a chapel. To me, that was Tuscany.

ORIGA: Let’s discuss painting.

PRATT: We, the Italians, don’t know much about our own art. We think of Baroque painting, of the Neapolitan seicento, unfolding into the 18th Century. There are the most beautiful paintings of Neapolitan markets that nobody knows about. I can’t understand that people speak so much of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne -- definitely great masters, don’t get me wrong -- but one forgets to speak of the Italian macchiaioli*. Think of Fattori. The fact is that even art is subject to fashion. Klimt and Egon Schiele came out because someone was smart enough to make them come out. It was Sgarbi -- that one who’s always on TV nowadays -- who made Norman Rockwell known in Italy by organizinga show of all the Saturday Evening Post covers. It was Sgarbi who first began to talk of Rockwell as a great painter, when others had always looked on him as a Sunday painter. But Rockwell has nothing to envy from the Flemish artists.

ORIGA: Corto Maltese magazine stopped publishing with the July issue...

PRATT: Yes, after almost ten years... To make it, they should have waited until October. The publishing house Rizzoli decided to close up shop, figuring that it wasn’t worth losing any more money, because they’d already lost a great deal. Nevertheless, of all the slick magazines, Corto Maltese was the best. It was still selling 16-17,000 copies, while the others were under 12 or 8,000. To cancel a magazine like that, where every month great artists and great writers were published, was like throwing away a part of culture. It’s not by chance that everybody talks about it, everybody regrets it. Rizzoli could have kept Corto Maltese afloat. They said that it was the apple of their eye, but it turned out that the apple had gone sour.
    So a cycle ends. And I still had to wrap up a story.

ORIGA: The last panel is meaningful.

PRATT: Yes, there’s a character who says “We shall all be on the street.”

*The macchiaioli were a group of 19th-century Florentine and Neapolitan painters rather similar to the French Impressionists. Giovanni Fattori (1825-1908) was their most famous member.