International award-winning graphic novelist Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese returns to American readers in a new collection of classic Corto tales, featuring a brilliantly executed wild chase through Venice for a vital occult treasure! Artist Hugo Pratt’s most famous creation, the indefatigable sailor Corto Maltese, sails back to American readers after a far too-long absence in Corto Maltese: Fable of Venice and Other Adventures. Corto, a modern Ulysses whose wanderings in the early decades of the 20th century take him to the most fascinating places on Earth, is a hard-luck, hard-driving iconoclastic anti-hero who values freedom and independence more than wealth and status. In “Fable of Venice,” a riddle from a deceased friend plunges Corto into a phantasmagorical mystery thriller that zigzags between the solidity of dreams and the fluidity of reality.  A frantic chase in 1921 Venice ensues, up twisting stairs and down tangled alleys, as Corto vies against Freemasons, occultists, budding fascists, and his friend (suddenly back from the dead) in a mad scramble to secure a mystical emerald that will open the doors of forbidden magic and unravel time and space itself! In addition, this collection of quintessential seafaring adventures also presents the Corto Maltese classics “The Secret of Tristan Bantam,” “So Much for Gentlemen of Fortune,” and “The Seagull's Fault,” making this book an exciting introduction to Pratt’s work. Black & white illustrations throughout "... bursts of action alternating with moments of quiet contemplation and riddle-infested conversations between characters who are all hiding a lot from each other. ... This is one of Pratt’s masterpieces, and a five-star book any day of the week." ― The Slings and Arrows Graphic Novel Guide "Pratt’s tales are like coming home to an entire oeuvre of fables you’ve never known existed but have always been waiting to read." ― Reactormag.com "expressive ... bold ... full of magic and romantic adventure" ― Frank Miller Hugo Pratt (1927–1995), author and artist, was inducted into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 2005 and was awarded the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême at the Angoulême Festival. He is considered to be one of the greatest international graphic novelists. Born in Italy and hailed as “the inventor of the literary comic strip,” he is best known for his popular comic book adventurer, Corto Maltese. Dean Mullaney is the winner of multiple Eisner Awards for his work as editor and publisher at Eclipse Comics. He is the creative director and editor of The Library of American Comics. Simone Castaldi  is a Professor of Italian at Hofstra University in New York where he teaches cinema, literature, and comics studies. He is the author of the first in-depth English language study of Italian comics, Drawn and Dangerous  (University Press of Mississippi), a book analyzing the intersection of the postmodern arts with Italian auteur comics during the 1980s. He has also published articles and contributed chapters to books on Italian cinema, literature, and comics. In 2020, in collaboration with Deam Mullaney, he completed the translation of Hugo Pratt's  Corto Maltese , a twelve-volume series for The Library of American Comics (IDW).