Hugo Pratt

Moving from the cross-medial nature of the graphic novel, we will analyse two works – "Mū. La città perduta" by Hugo Pratt (1988) and "Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo" by Andrea Pazienza (1987) – in order to demonstrate the agency of image and its dynamic nature. According to this idea, the graphic novel becomes a multiple support: a hypertext and a place of exchange.

Dans l'album Tango, numéro vingt-sept des célèbres aventures dessinées de Corto Maltese (1987),  Hugo Pratt, Italien cosmopolite ayant vécu quinze ans en Argentine dans les années cinquante, porte à travers son personnage de retour à Buenos Aires une lumière et un regard tango sur l’évolution du XXe siècle.
La déambulation urbaine de Corto se déploie sur un arrière-fond historique subtilement détaillé, qui interroge la construction libérale du pays (1880-1929). La question de la prostitution est réinscrite dans le cadre politique et économique plus vaste de l’Argentine des années vingt. Le lecteur retrouve Butch Cassidy, déjà croisé par Corto lors de son précédent séjour argentin.
Avec cette fresque inspirée de l’histoire argentine et de son imaginaire culturel, Hugo Pratt développe ici, plus que la « rhétorique du tango » à laquelle Corto fait allusion au début du récit, une poétique du tango, faite de dédoublements, de rythme, d’intensité, et de contrastes.

The purpose of this commentary piece is to uncover some of the key the cultural determinants of party systems change. Our basic claim is that the 1960s witnessed what we call the rise of the fluid self, of an individual who had complex, conflicting, and inconsistent preferences. We ground the pervasiveness of fluidity in this notion of the individual in key elements of popular culture (theater, popular music, Western film characters etc.) to show that cultural expressions reflect, but also shape, the culture of a society and transformation in its party system and public policy. We then link this to the crisis of parties, understood in diverse ways, that has faced European party systems and the success of their conocomitant electoral policy offers for decades. We advance three related claims: first, that the rise of the fluid self created a conflict between structures and the individual; second, that this conflict made the previous/existing structures obsolete; and, third, that the obsolescence of such structures led to the unfreezing of Western European party systems and higher levels of party system fluidity, both of which have a bearing on policy making and policy studies.

Nel 1978 Will Eisner inaugura, con il suo Contratto con Dio, storia di un pio ebreo a cui viene sottratta la figlia, un tipo di fumetto che esplora temi seri e di grande rilevanza, quali il rapporto col divino e la difficoltà delle relazioni sociali, ampliando lo spazio della narrazione rispetto alla componente visiva. Convenzionalmente quest’opera segna la nascita del graphic novel, forma testuale ormai emergente nel panorama della cultura contemporanea, differente dal comic tradizionale poiché  presenta una struttura narrativa elaborata e interconnessa, autoconclusiva, caratterizzata da un marcato approfondimento della psicologia dei personaggi, da un rapporto sinergico e tendenzialmente conflittuale fra complessità del discorso scritto e immediatezza delle immagini, dalla permeabilità ad altre forme di espressione artistica e codici comunicativi. Fondamentale, infine, l’intento di affrontare problemi cruciali della società attuale, sia da un punto di vista personale – la narrazione del sé costituisce un sottogenere del graphic novel – che collettivo, raffigurando gli orrori della guerra, della povertà, gli effetti devastanti del pregiudizio.
La presente ricerca intende proporre il graphic novel come genere ibrido, per la sua configurazione intersemiotica, e trasversale alle forme letterarie tradizionali; si esamineranno, all’interno della già vasta produzione italiana, alcuni prodotti che possono essere ‘agganciati’ ai generi canonici, rielaborati secondo differenti modalità compositive.
L’indagine prende l’avvio da La rivolta dei racchi (1966) di Guido Buzzelli, raffigurazione di un mondo distopico con evidenti intenti di critica sociale; la rivolta dei Racchi contro i Belli determinerà solo caos, violenza, sancendo il fallimento del sogno democratico. Una ballata del mare salato (1967-1969) di Hugo Pratt affronta invece il genere ‘avventura’ introducendo un complesso personaggio di antieroe, Corto Maltese, in una narrazione plurivocale che ha come sfondo l’Oceano di Conrad, di Stevenson e di Melville, forza della natura difficilmente governabile. Le tre strisce orizzontali per foglio scandiscono il ritmo della narrazione, il tratto preciso e insieme evocativo sospende la vicenda fra realtà e immaginazione.
Con Poema a fumetti (1969) Dino Buzzati abbiamo una riscrittura del mito classico in chiave attualizzante: Orfi (Orfeo) è una rockstar che si innamora di Eura, ben presto scomparsa negli abissi  di una villa milanese; l’Inferno buzzatiano è abitato da una miriade di corpi femminili sessualmente provocanti, a mostrare visivamente il conflitto Eros/Thanatos che anima l’opera.
La biografia romanzata è ben rappresentata: citiamo ad esempio l’intenso Sweet Salgari (2012) di Paolo Bacilieri; centrale infine la dimensione di critica sociale, che si indirizza contro gli stereotipi o l’ingiustizia delle guerre, mostrata in Kobane Calling (2016) di Zerocalcare. Il graphic novel, forma testuale prismatica e duttile, atta ad esprimere i contenuti più diversi, può essere quindi considerato un vero e proprio genere letterario, in grado di raffigurare le differenti, talvolta contrastanti, componenti della complessa, caotica, precaria società attuale.

This article examines seven graphic narratives by the Italian graphic artist and writer Hugo Pratt. The article reads these narratives in connection with the myth of the Great War as it was defined by the Italian historian and literary critic Isnenghi in 1970 in his groundbreaking monograph Il mito della grande guerra. However, these graphic narratives present readers with a bewildering mix of historical/quasi-historical characters, real and imaginary places, often establishing surprising and complex intertextual short-circuits that connect Pratt's World War I narratives, history, and the historical imagination. This reading can help us to understand why a comparative approach is unavoidable when dealing with graphic narratives, especially those dealing with historical events-like World War I-which impacted several countries across more than one continent.

Este artículo trata de recordar a los autores y personajes del cómic italiano de los últimos 40 años de todos los géneros y para todo tipo de lectores que se han dado a conocer en publicaciones españolas. Entre los personajes más emblemáticas destacan: Lupo Alberto, Martin Mystère, Pimpa , Tex Willer, Cocco Bill, Corto Maltese o Valentina.

Animated Corto, the aporia of a runaway adatptation. Although Hugo Pratt was inspired by a movie (Byron Haskin’s His Majesty O’Keefe, starring Burt Lancaster) while creating his main character Corto Maltese, he later became a life-long enemy of his character’s screen adaptation, as he rejected several attemps by either american or european studios. After Pratt’s death in 1995, french Canal+ and italian Rai Fiction started a medium-high budget production based on Corto Maltese’s long stories, including a collection of the short ones. The essay deals with the comic book adaptation theories and examines the main adaptations of Corto Maltese stories, focusing on the aporia of fidelity in the field of intersemiotic translation.

L’objectif de cet article est de rapprocher Robert Louis Stevenson et Hugo Pratt par le biais de leur relation au Pacifique. Nous ferons l’hypothèse que la culture polynésienne, dont chacun d’eux a une connaissance extrêmement précise, a tendance à s’exprimer, dans leur œuvre fictionnelle, de manière particulière lorsqu’elle est liée à la navigation ou à l’expérience de la mer : elle prend alors la forme du mythe, de la pause poétique ou fantastique, où le récit se détache de la représentation historique pour s’inscrire dans le temps long du conte.

*Pre-peer reviewed version of forthcoming book review*
This review offers a critical summary of each contribution in the volume as well as reflections on: the mafia movie, Made in Italy, the ambivalence of popular culture in late capitalism, and anarchism.

Book: Italian Pop Culture: Media, Products, Imageries, Fabio Corsini (ED.) (2018) Rome: Viella Libreria editrice, 192 pp, ISBN: 9788867289394, p/bk, €25,00

Contents:
Fabio Corsini, Introduction: Working Out the Puzzle of Italian Popular Culture

Paolo Biondi, Understanding Italian Comics Culture: Hugo Pratt, the 9th Art and Politics

Marco Bracci And Edoardo Tabasso, Stil Novo. The Legendarily Adventurous Route of Italian Music in Search of Popular Maturity

Milly Buonanno, Fallen Heroes and Anti-Heroines: The Mafia
Story in Italian TV Drama

Fabio Corsini, Italian Webseries: The New (yet Old) Way of
Storytelling

Flavia Monceri, Porn as a Cultural Product

Anna Lucia Natale, In the Beginning There Was the Radio... Con-
texts and Genres of Radio Entertainment

Nicoletta Peluffo, The Adventures of Pinocchio: An Outcome of
Popular Culture

Kristin Stasiowski, A Divine Comedy for All Time: Dante’s Endu-
ring Relevance for the Contemporary Reader

Bernardo Valli, Italy and the Search for Modernity: At the Origins
of Made in Italy

The construction of a visuality based on the sequence in the images of Dante’s Divine Comedy constitutes a reference for all the forms of thought about the expressive conditions of comic books and graphic novels. Both the otherworldly journey and the encounter with the divine in Dante’s work and the construction of a moral-theological structure are also forms projected on some authors with a strongly literary background. The works of Hugo Pratt, Federico Fellini and Milo Manara and Makyo have created a thinking space about the sequenciality of images in which the figure of the traveller placed before a panel of images is echoed as a way of meditating on the power of the imagination.

La construcción de una visualidad fundada sobre la secuencia en las imágenes en la Divina Comedia de Dante constituye un referente para la reflexión sobre las condiciones expresi- vas del cómic. Tanto el viaje ultramundano en la obra de Dante como la idea del tratado erudito y la construcción de una estructura teológico-moral constituyen asimismo formas que, a través de Dante, se proyectan sobre ciertos autores que han tratado de realizar una aproximación literaria al género fantástico en el cómic. Las obras de Hugo Pratt, Federico Fellini y Milo Manara y Makyo, han gestado un espacio de reflexión sobre la secuencia de imágenes. En él la figura del viajero situado ante un panel de imágenes se reitera como manera de meditar sobre la potencia de la imaginación en el espacio entre imágenes.

La laguna dei bei sogni e un solo (lungo) silenzio Luca Raffaelli The lagoon of sweet dreams and only one (long) silence. Hugo Pratt has been the first cartoonist able to highlight both dialogues and silences into adventure. In a short tale belonging to the first series of Corto Maltese's adventures – the charachter is present only in a few frames, at the very beginning and at the end – Pratt shows to the reader the last moments of an English sargent escaped from the First World War. His delirium is coincident with the accomplishment of all his desires. The penultimate page proposes three close-up of three different characters (Corto Maltese is the last one) looking towards us, silently. For the comics' history these three frames are memorable, marking the passage from dream to reality, from death to life.

Dans le cadre d'une exposition visant a traiter des biais genres dans le traitement, graphique et scenaristique, du neuvieme art, cet article interroge la position, le role et la figure des femmes qui accompagnent Corto Maltese le long de ses aventures, sous la plume d'Hugo Pratt, Les femmes de Pratt sont des personnages centraux et secondaires a la fois. Adjuvantes ou opposantes, elles constituent aussi pour le heros des referents nostalgiques dans la construction romantique qu'en fait son auteur.

Storie Straordinarie di Italiani nel Pacifico portrays the narratives and memoirs of unhonored, enigmatic, buried in oblivion Italian pioneers in fin-de-siècle Oceania intersecting and clashing with the postmodern clichés populating the mind of Italian literati, cinematographers, and the pages of popular magazines and comic books.

Its content and nostalgic cover à la Hugo Pratt are winning the attention of the book review sections on Italian newspapers and media. Without any doubt, one of the very few publications in Italian about Italians involved in that 1/3 of the globe historically ignored and often misrepresented in Italy.

Introduction by Marco Cuzzi; Chapters from Matteo Aria, Louis Bousquet & Lorenz Gonschor, Lorenzo Brutti & Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone, Gaia Cottino, Elisabetta de Dominis & Paola Predolin, Incoronata Inserra, Massimo Morello, Alessandro Marzo-Magno, Antonio Pagliaro, Andrea Vento; Epilogue by Guido Carlo Pigliasco; Afterword by Laura Scarpa.

Hugo Pratt nous avait toujours habitués à ce que son célèbre héros, Corto Maltese, soit placé sous le signe de l'errance et du dépaysement. Pourtant, avec le dernier labum de la série, /Mû/, jamais le maestro  n'avait concentré autant de techniques variées de suggestion de l'ailleurs avec autant de virtuosité.

In many of the works of authors such as Moebius, Hugo Pratt, Didier Comès, Philippe Druillet, Edmond Baudoin or even Hergé or Winsor McCay, it often happens that the way of visual form abysses itself in a situation in which the rhythmic dimension of the stroke, from the unleashed sequence a suspension of the story, a kind of abyss or momentary deviation linked to an experience of ight from the visual form and, frequently, also from the story. In the expression "trance of the draftsman" the theorist Thierry Smolderen (1986) found a way of hearing a phenomenon of perceptual suspension that also compromises the reading experience. With the present article, it is less about delimiting a phenomenological category because it is dif cult to delimit than proposing a succinct re ection on the phenomenon of "trance of the draftsman" from the experience of rhythm, ritual and hermeneutics of the imaginary.

https://www.tebeosfera.com/documentos/ritmo_trance_e_intervalo_alucinatorio_hacia_un_pensar_hipnotico_en_el_comic.html

En muchas de las obras de autores como Moebius, Hugo Pratt, Didier Comès, Philippe Druillet, Edmond Baudoin o incluso Hergé o Winsor McCay sucede con frecuencia que el discurrir de la forma visual se abisma en una situación en la que la dimensión rítmica del trazo, de la secuencia desata una suspensión del relato, una especie de abismamiento o desviación momentánea ligada a una experiencia de fuga de la forma visual y, con frecuencia, también del relato. En la expresión «trance del dibujante» el teórico Thierry Smolderen (1986) encontró una forma de aludir un fenómeno de suspensión perceptiva que compromete también la experiencia de la lectura. Con el presente artículo, se trata menos de delimitar una categoría fenomenológica per se difícil de acotar que de proponer una sucinta re exión sobre el fenómeno del "trance del dibujante" desde la experiencia del ritmo, el ritual y hermenéutica de lo imaginario.

https://www.tebeosfera.com/documentos/ritmo_trance_e_intervalo_alucinatorio_hacia_un_pensar_hipnotico_en_el_comic.html

Proche des anarchistes, des rebelles, des hors-la-loi, c'est assez naturellement qu'on retrouve Corto Maltese impliqué dans les soubresauts de quelques-unes des grandes Révolutions qui ont émaillé le premier tiers du vingtième siècle, avec leurs figures tutélaires : la Révolution mexicaine de Pancho Villa et Emiliano Zapata, la Révolution russe de Lénine, Trotski, Maïakovski et la Révolution irlandaise, dans ce pays aux vertes collines où les frères s'entretuent.

Desiderio di conoscenza, doveri militari, commercio, fughe “all’inglese” o semplicemente l’anelito a una vita migliore. Questi e altri motivi spinsero alcuni nostri connazionali “dall’altra parte del mondo”. Come il nume tutelare di tutti i viaggiatori dei Mari del Sud: il galantuomo di fortuna uscito dalla matita di Hugo Pratt, questi particolari individui spesso vissero vite straordinarie e romanzesche.
Il professor Marco Cuzzi assieme al collega antropologo Guido Carlo Pigliasco (seppur in absentia) ed al noto saggista Alessandro Marzo Magno racconteranno queste storie, a partire dalla collettanea Storie straordinarie di italiani nel Pacifico (a cura di Marco Cuzzi e Guido Carlo Pigliasco, Odoya, Bologna 2016), volume nato dalla collaborazione di autori italiani che risiedono tra l’Italia, le Hawaii e Bangkok.

Tutti gli eventi in programma a casaBASE necessitano di prenotazione obbligatoria presso l’info point del punto cardinale a partire da 45 minuti prima dell’incontro.

The vast and not completely charted oeuvre of graphic artist and writer Hugo Pratt includes not a few war comics, but only seven of them deal with the Great War or First World War. They are:
1967 Una ballata del mare salato [The Ballad of the Salt Sea] (graphic novel)
1971 "La lagune des beaux songes” in Pif (Editions Vaillant), # 117 [The Lagoon of Beautiful Dreams]
1971 "L'ange à la fenêtre d'orent" Pif #135 [The Angel at the Eastern Window]
1971 "Sous le drapeau de l’argent” in Pif # 143 [Under the Flag of Money]
1972 "Le songe d'un matin d'inver" Pif #161 [A Midwinter Morning's Dream]
1972 "Côtés de nuit et roses de Picardie" Pif #172 [Côtés de nuit and Picardy Roses]
1972 "Burlesque entre Zuydcoot et Bray-Dune" Pif #179 [Burlesque between Zuydcoote and Bray-Dune]
I will read those comics in connection with the myth of the Great war.

Dieser Vorschlag zielt auf einen neuen Interpretationsweg der Bildstreifengeschichte von Hugo Pratt (Rimini 1927 - Grandvaux 1995) Sirat al Bunduqqiyah. Der zentrale Punkt dieser textuellen Interpretation lautet: Das Konzept der Extravagança ist eine Facette jener literarischen Gattung, die ein Muster des daydreaming, der Dimension des Phantastischen, als ihr Objekt betrachtet.