"Corto Maltese set the standard for all adult adventure comics in Europe. By the mid-1970s, Corto was the continent's most popular series and Hugo Pratt the world's leading graphic novelist. The adventures of this modern Ulysses are set during the first thirty years of the 20th Century in such exotic locales as Pratt's native Venice, the steppes of Manchuria, the Caribbean islands, the Danakil deserts, the Amazon forests, and the waves of the Pacific."--iPage.