Publisher's Synopsis
Originally serialized beginning in 1967, this book is
universally acknowledged as Hugo Pratt's masterpiece, in which he introduces
Corto Maltese to the world. Corto is but one of a strong ensemble cast of
characters whose lives permeate the entire 12book series. It is here that we
also meet the young and beautiful Pandora, her brother Cain, the mysterious
criminal mastermind Monk, the grim and ferocious Rasputin, Lieutenant Slutter of
the German Navy, and the natives Skull and Tarao. The Ballad of the Salty Sea is
also hailed as the first example of the literary comic strip. Pratt was inspired
by Conrad, Stevenson, and London, but even more directly by Henry de Vere
Stacpool's Blue Lagoon, from which the author got the idea of a small island in
the Pacific which he named "Escondida."
The action begins in November 1913 in the South Seas
as feelings of the Great War were already looming but the romantic ideals of the
nineteenth century were still alive. The pace of the narrative and the drawings
are very modern and Pratt permeates the adventure with an extraordinary
atmosphere of the great outdoors. The story captures the imagination of the
reader from the opening pages with a tight, compelling storyline that can be
interpreted on different levels.
This EuroComics edition features new translations from
Pratt's original Italian scripts by Dean Mullaney, the Eisner and Harvey
Awardwinning editor of the Library of American Comics, and Simone Castaldi,
Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Hofstra, and the
author of Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s (University
Press of Mississippi).
