Because of that, Pratt doesn’t have any opportunities to use broad sweeping vistas spread across large spreads or splash pages. The book sticks to a structure of four tiers of panels per page, like something you’d see in a comic strip collection.

He is held at gunpoint, survives bridges blowing up from underneath him, can’t trust anyone, has friends who come and go as they please, and gets wrapped up with convenient political alliances to get his primary job done. Maltese travels across Asia to steal a gold-loaded train, but then gets wrapped up in larger issues and the shifting alliances of political frenemies. Pratt breaks it up into a few chapters that delineate each movement of the story, if you will. It is paced and structured like one, complete with chapters that might, to an American reader, feel like multiple issues of a comic book series being collected.Īnd there’s a lot of story in one book. Pratt imitates that pacing without falling pray to all its shortcomings, like the daily repetition of the story thus far and the need to end every row of panels on some kind of question mark or exclamation point. I couldn’t shake that feeling with every tier of every page. It seriously feels like an old adventure comic strip from the newspapers of 60 years ago. You need to slow your mind down a little bit from the modern day breakneck style, and you’ll find yourself in a comfortable groove. Honestly, once you get into that rhythm, Pratt carries the story along beautifully. Given my deficit to start with, I found that to be very handy. Pages are loaded up with memorable images and enough dialogue to spell everything out, if you can just keep all the names straight. It’s dense and covers every story beat deliberately. Some of the things might have been better surprises. I just think I would have enjoyed it more if I didn’t need it to be explained. I don’t think the book asks too much of you in this department. I just followed along with the story, let Hugo Pratt explain things as the story moves along, and found a lot to admire. Still, I enjoyed the book a lot in spite of that. I can only stuff so much stuff into my brain, I guess. I’m not proud of this knowledge gap, but I admit that it’s there.

You have people from Germany, Japan, China, and Russia all racing across the country here, with various political entanglements and double-crossing and surprising alliances. So I have to admit up front that I don’t have the background to follow everything in this story, or to know who the political and military enemies and allies are. By the time I went to college, I majored in American History and didn’t look much at Asia. It’s not the area that gets taught that much in American schools, at least as I was growing up.

There’s a blank spot in my education for this historical period and geography. Writer/Artist: Hugo Pratt Published by: IDW Publishing Number of Pages: 118 Original Publication: 1974

Corto maltese idw