Hugo Pratt was one of the great literary cartoonists of the twentieth century, best known as the creator of the philosophical sea-adventurer Corto Maltese (1967). Formed in the Argentine comics school of the 1950s, Pratt developed an economical brush-and-ink style — spare, atmospheric, musical — that treated comics as a form capable of world literature. His deeply researched voyages through colonial history, from the South Pacific to the Horn of Africa, remain a benchmark of ambition for the bande dessinée tradition.