Review: THE MAN FROM THE GREAT NORTH

THE MAN FROM THE GREAT NORTH
IDW PUBLISHING/EuroComics – @IDWPublishing

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

CARTOONIST: Hugo Pratt
TRANSLATION: Dean Mullaney, Simone Castaldi, and Ariane Levesque Looker
COLORS: Annie Frognier and Patrizia Zanotti
EDITOR: Dean Mullaney
ISBN:  978-1-68405-058-1; hardcover – 8 1/2” x 11” (October 2017)
104pp, Color, $24.99 U.S., $33.99 CAN (November 21, 2017)

Hugo Pratt (1927 to 1995) was an Italian comic book creator and artist.  Some consider him to be among the first literary and artistic comic book creators, and his best known work is his Corto Maltese series, which he produced from 1967 to 1988.

IDW Publishing is currently publishing new English-language editions of Pratt's graphic albums and comics.  One of those is a full-color graphic novel, The Man From the Great North.  It was initially entitled Jésuite Joe and was serialized in the French comics magazines, Pilote.  Jésuite Joe was then collected as a graphic album in 1980 in France (by Dargaud).  In Italy, it was published as L'uomo del grande nord (The Man From the Great North) and was one of four graphic novels that Hugo Pratt contributed to Italian publisher Edizioni Cepim's “One Man, One Adventure” series.

IDW's The Man From the Great North is the first English-language version of Jésuite Joe (according to the publisher).  IDW's edition includes Pratt's original 48-page version of Jésuite Joe and also 21 pages of storyboard material that Pratt produced for a 1991 French film based on the graphic novel and directed by Olivier Austen.  The storyboards are integrated into the original graphic novel to produce an expanded version of the Jésuite Joe graphic novel.

IDW's The Man From the Great North also has five pages of watercolors studies and five spot illustrations that Pratt produced for Jésuite Joe.  Pratt also produced 19 pages of a second Jésuite Joe story that he never finished, and that is reprinted in this book.

The story focuses on Jesuit Joe, who is a “Métis,” an ethnic group in Canada and part of the United States that is descended from indigenous North Americans (Native Americans) and European settlers.  In Joe's case, he is of French-Canadian (father) and Mohawk (mother) descent.

The Man From the Great North's story takes place in 1912 in Canada (the “Great North”), and for most of the story, Joe is dressed in the uniform of a Royal North West Mounted Police (RNWMP), specifically a corporal's uniform.  Joe finds the uniform in a cabin shortly before he kills two men who hat shot into the cabin.  Next, he encounters a Cree medicine man in the middle of some kind of ceremony involving a baby stolen from white settlers, and Joe kills him.

Thus, begins Jesuit Joe's spree of killing and violence that includes a Catholic priest, family, Indians, and the man who is tracking him, Sergeant Fox, among others.  All the while, Jesuit Joe is looking for something... something ephemeral... or absolute.

In his essay, “Whatever became of Jesuit Joe?”, Gianni Brunoro writes that Hugo Pratt “...was interested in telling stories about ideas.”  Brunoro writes that Jesuit Joe may have been “an ideologically completed story,” so for Pratt, there was nothing to which he should return.  Something else worth noting:  in his forward to Jésuite Joe, written in 1991, Pratt talks about writers who influenced this creation, including Jack London and Zane Gray.

For me, Jesuit Joe seems like an idea, a story about a guy going through the wilderness of the “Great North,” killing people at just about every stop because that is what he does.  His motivation is inscrutable, unless a reader wants to admit that Joe does things simply because he wants to do those things.  He is simultaneously ephemeral, a force of nature, and a personification of death.  One can see that this story and character seem like ideas inspired by the works of Jack London.

The story in The Man From the Great North is impressionistic and is told in illustrations that are abstract when they are not treading the ground of realist art.  The influence of the great American cartoonist, Milton Caniff, is evident on The Man From the Great North, as it is on Pratt's Corto Maltese series.  The storyboard pages are loose and seem immediate and relevant, but do not show the influence of any particular artist or writer.  They seem like pure Pratt.

This story, with its wraith-like character who wanders a sometimes dream-like wilderness landscape, seems to me to be about inspiring the reader's imagination.  Pratt seems to tell us to follow Joe and make of it what our imaginations will.  I find that this story does indeed arouse my imagination, and I cannot help but be intrigued and emotionally involved in it.  The violence (murder, kidnapping, assault, rape, etc.) moves me.  I feel something... and some things I should not admit...

There will be no more Jesuit Joe by Hugo Pratt.  I want more because this story moves me.  There is no beginning, middle, and end in a traditional way; in fact, The Man From the Great North seems like a small section of a larger story.  Like Pratt's other work, this is a work of graphic fiction and graphic storytelling that grabs the reader in ways that larger, more developed comics do not.  That is the reason why Pratt is always worth reading, but concerning Jesuit Joe, this is the end.

9 out of 10

[This book includes a forward by Hugo Pratt, and an essay, “Whatever became of Jesuit Joe?” by Gianni Brunoro.]

EuroComics.us

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


The text is copyright © 2018 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for reprint and syndication rights and fees.

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Review: CORTO MALTESE: Fable of Venice

CORTO MALTESE: FABLE OF VENICE
IDW PUBLISHING/EuroComics – @IDWPublishing

[This review was originally published on Patreon.]

CARTOONIST: Hugo Pratt
TRANSLATION: Dean Mullaney and Simone Castaldi
EDITOR: Dean Mullaney
ISBN:  978-1-63140-926-4; paperback with French flaps – 9 1/4” x 10 5/8” (August 2017)
64pp, B&W, $19.99 U.S., $25.99 CAN (September 26, 2017)

Hugo Pratt (1927 to 1995) was an Italian comic book creator and artist.  Some consider him to be among the first literary and artistic comic book creators, and his best known work is his Corto Maltese series, which he produced from 1967 to 1988.  Beginning with Ballad of the Salt Sea in 1976, the series was collected in 12 books (or graphic novels).

Back in July 2014, IDW Publishing announced that it was going to publish the complete Corto Maltese in a series of twelve trade paperbacks, using Hugo Pratt’s original over-sized black and white format.  These trade paperbacks (which can also be called “graphic albums”) are published under IDW's “EuroComics” imprint.  They feature new translations into English from Hugo Pratt’s original Italian scripts by Simone Castaldi, Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Hofstra, and Dean Mullaney, the longtime comics publisher, editor, and translator who is also the creative director of the IDW's imprints, “The Library of American Comics” and EuroComics.

In September 2017, IDW published Corto Maltese: Fable of Venice.  It was originally published in 1976 as Favola di Venezia, the eighth book in the series.  The story takes place in Venice (Pratt's hometown) in 1921 and is a mystery thriller set during the rise of Fascism in Italy.

Fable of Venice finds the enigmatic sea captain, Corto Maltese, returning to Venice, Italy.  He has been brought to the city by the riddle of an old acquaintance, Baron Corvo, and now, he needs to find Corvo's diary.  In that diary are inscriptions related to the whereabouts of the “Clavicle of Solomon,” a legendary emerald and magical talisman.

Corto is not the only one after this magical object that is steeped in history and mysticism.  There are his friends, Bepi Faliero and Böeke, and the young Blackshirts (Fascists), Stevani and Boselli.  There is mystery woman, Hipazia, who believes that she is the reincarnation of a prominent figure in the School of Alexandria.  Corto also finds that the Freemasons and their masonic lodge, R L Hermes, frequently pop up during his search.  Freemasons, Vikings, Teutonic Knights, King Solomon, Jewish mysticism, the Queen of Sheba, Biblical figures, mysterious Arabs, and the genie of the lamp:  are they all part of a quest that will unravel time and space or are they all chasing a fantasy?

I first heard of Hugo Pratt and Corto Maltese when Frank Miller mentioned them as influences on his work leading up to his then-new comic book, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.  Pratt's own influences include 19th and 20th century adventure storytellers like novelist Robert Louis Stevens (Treasure Island) and cartoonist Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates).

Fable of Venice specifically is influenced by the magical realist literature of South American writers like Jose Luis Borges (whose work Pratt would have encountered during his years living and working in Argentina) and American novelist Dashiell Hammett.  In fact, while reading Fable of Venice I could not stop thinking about Hammett's most famous novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), which was twice adapted into film, with the 1941 John Huston-Humphrey Bogart film being more famous.

So I think of Fable of Venice as a magical realist take on The Maltese Falcon set in Venice during the rise of Fascism.  This is the first time that I have read a Corto Maltese graphic novel (thanks to a review copy provided to me by IDW), so I really do not know this character.  What attracts me to this novel are two things.

The first thing are the characters.  I cannot choose a favorite, because each one is like a delightful flavor in a wondrous hoodoo gumbo.  They are simultaneously weird and recognizable and sinister and attractive.  Each of these character is so eccentric and colorful that he or she makes this black and white comic seem like a spinning kaleidoscope throwing off sparklers.

The second great thing about Fable of Venice is Hugo Pratt's gorgeous black and white art and sumptuous graphical storytelling.  This is simply some of the most beautiful black and white comic book art that I have ever seen.  This book is like a slim, paperback version of one of editor Scott Dunbier's “Artist Editions” (also from IDW).  I think that this story is so rich and complicated because Pratt maximized his over-sized pages with nine to 12 panels to page.  Whereas so many American artists draw big panels and half-splash and full-splash pages, Pratt uses the 9 to 12-panel grid to delve into the details of the characters, moods, situations, and his wonderfully magical Venetian setting.

From the opening pages' Masonic gathering and Corto's arrival to the final pages' gathering of players and magical realist and surrealist ending, Pratt pushes past any imaginary boundary lines forced on the graphical and comics medium.  Over 40 years after Fables of Venice was first published, Hugo Pratt's work is still ahead of most comics being published today.

A+
10 out of 10

EuroComics.us

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


The text is copyright © 2018 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog for syndication rights and fees.

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STAR WARS THE CLASSIC NEWSPAPER COMICS Volume 1

STAR WARS THE CLASSIC NEWSPAPER COMICS, VOL. 1
IDW PUBLISHING/The Library of American Comics – @IDWPublishing

[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]

WRITERS: Russ Manning; Steve Gerber; Russ Helm; Don Christensen
ARTISTS: Russ Manning; Mike Royer; Rick Hoberg; Dave Stevens
EDITOR/DESIGNER: Dean Mullaney
ISBN: 978-1-63140-872-4; Over-sized 11” x 8.5” hardcover-with-dust jacket (May 9, 2017)
264pp, Color and B&W, $49.99 U.S., $65.99 CAN

Introductions by Rich Handley and Henry G. Franke III.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... there was a Star Wars newspaper comic strip, which included a daily strip in black and white and a full-color Sunday episode.  From 1979 to 1984, a group of dedicated writers and artists “brought us all the action of the movie [Star Wars] in a daily adventure comic strip!”

Now for the first time, courtesy of IDW Publishing and its imprint, The Library of American Comics, the classic Star Wars newspaper strip is being reprinted in its entirety and in its complete format.  That includes each Sunday title header and the “bonus” panels in their restored original color.  Star Wars The Classic Newspaper Comics, Volume 1 was published in May and contains 575 sequential comic strips from the Star Wars comic strip’s premiere on March 11, 1979 to October 5, 1980.

This collection covers ten story arcs, beginning with the first three, which were written and drawn by the legendary newspaper comics and comic book artist, Russ Manning.  The next six story lines were drawn by Manning with the help of several artists, among them Rick Hoberg and Dave Stevens, and written by Russ Helm, Don Christensen, and Steve Gerber.  This book's final story arc is drawn entirely by legendary Filipino comic book artist, Alfredo Alcala, and written by Helm.

The Star Wars newspaper strip features the classic characters from the classic original film, Star Wars (1977).  Luke, Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, C-3PO, R2-D2, and, of course, Darth Vader, spar for the fate of the galaxy.  In “Gambler's World,” Luke and Leia travel to Vorzyd 5, a world that is one planet-wide casino, and our heroes must shut down this gambling operation that funds the Galactic Empire's military efforts.  Han Solo and Chewbacca race “The Second Kessel Run” to stop a ship that can use a planet's weather and climate to destroy that world.  In “Bring Me the Children,” the entire Star Wars gang leads a ragtag band of pilots, who are also friends of Han Solo, to save a group of children from the murderous clutches of the Empire.

Once upon a time, the Star Wars franchise consisted of a few novels, a few dozen comic books, and assorted odds and ends.  In this fledgling universe, the Star Wars newspaper comics were born.  Because there was only a single movie upon which the creators of the strip could draw (and not a big expanded universe), the Star Wars newspaper comics came about as close to the tone and spirit of the original film as any official Star Wars spin-off ever got, perhaps even closer than Marvel Comics first run of Star Wars comic books.

I think what makes that possible is that the beginning of the Star Wars newspaper comics was guided by Russ Manning.  Manning's career as an illustrator and as a comic book artist began with his childhood love of pulp magazines and of science fiction in the 1930s and 40s.  As a young professional artist, he worked on the kind of material that entertained and influenced a young George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars.  In fact, Manning's best known work, the comic book, Magnus, Robot Righter, which he created, made him the ideal choice to be the writer-artist to bring Star Wars to the newspaper comics pages.  Manning gives the early story arcs a tone and a spirit that recalls space opera and space jockey adventurers like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, as well as the B-movie serials of the 1930s and 40s and 1950s sci-fi films – all Star Wars influences or antecedents to one extent or another.

What really shows is Manning's great talent for character design and creature creation and for his ability to fabricate exotic locales and environments.  Characters like “Black Hole” (a Darth Vader agent, lackey, and spy) and the wookies of Chewbacca's home planet (to say nothing of the fauna and foliage) are inventive and striking.

I do not want to downplay the contributions of the other writers and artists who worked on the first two years of this newspaper comic, but Manning sets the tone.  Manning was captivated by the original Star Wars and described it as incredible to the Los Angeles Times.  His love and admiration shows in the narrative and in the graphically striking art Manning produced for the strip, and that carries on through the stories reprinted in Star Wars The Classic Newspaper Comics, Volume 1.

For Star Wars fans who read this in a newspaper back when it was originally published, these comics are probably as entertaining now as they were then.  For someone who is just reading them now, like me, well, these newspaper comics, feel, read, and look like old-timey, original Star Wars.  IDW and The Library of American Comics do it again!  No fan of Star Wars comic books can go without reading Star Wars The Classic Newspaper Comics, Volume 1.

A
9 out of 10

Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"


The text is copyright © 2017 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this site or blog for syndication rights and fees.

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