EXTRACTS: British War Comics Illustrators Special © 2018 The Book Palace (144 PAGES in Full edition)

143 Hugo Pratt Howacomic-stripsuperstar's travels afforded him a brief, yet fruitful, stint with the UK's war comics. Although Hugo Pratt is widely remembered for his self-penned Corto Maltese series of comics, like many other self-made comic art super-stars, he served a long apprenticeship hiring out his talents to a variety of publishers. Not least of these was Fleetway and this Illustrators War Special would be incomplete without an acknowledgment of his contribution to the pocket libraries. Born in Venice in 1927, Pratt was blessed with a most propitious line of DNA for someone seeking a career in the arts (in fact one of his relatives was William Henry Pratt, who became better known as Boris Karloff). His maternal grandfather, Joseph, was a poet and it is to Joseph that Pratt attributed his love of writing. Pratt’s father was a serving officer in the Italian Army and his mother was a part-time Tarot card reader. The young Hugo spent much of his early years in the company of the women in his family, with regular trips to the cinema in the company of his grandmother who, when they returned home, would encourage the boy to draw what he had seen in exchange for hot chocolate and cookies. However, whilst the cultural input that the young Pratt was exposed to was enriching, things were stirring on the geopolitical front which would have a profound influence on the boy. With Mussolini’s rise to power in Italy and his subsequent adventures in Abyssinia, Pratt’s father was seconded to the region with Pratt and his mother joining him in, what is now, Ethiopia. The experience of spending a considerable chunk of his childhood growing up in North Africa added greatly to Pratt’s love of exotic climes, but sadly this idyll was rudely shattered when Italy’s disastrous North African ABOVE: One of Hugo Pratt's most memorable war comics; pages from the insidiously creepy 'Night of the Devil', Battle Picture Library No. 62, published in June 1962. All war images © IPC Media All Images © IPC Media