Hugo Pratt - Ticonderoga Page 3

Published at the tail end of the 50's, Ticonderoga represents a new peak in the artistic journey of Hugo Pratt. At this moment, he's been living in Argentina for 10 years or so and has been working with very-talented storytellers like Alberto Ongaro and Hector Oesterheld.

Pratt and Oesterheld shared some common interest in America in the late 18th century. They had already dealt with it with their Sgt Kirk strip but decided to push it one step further with the launch of a new magazine, Frontera, that allowed them to introduce a brand new series, Ticonderoga.

Here, characters are definitely more dense, with multiple layers of personality that suddenly appear under extreme or mundane circumstances, constantly blurring the lines and keeping all the strands of the narrative open. Obviously, this is a pattern Pratt will definitely pursue and elaborate on in the following years...

It appears that only a few complete pages from this series are still around, since most have been, disassembled, cut and reshaped for adaptation to various publishing formats. While traces of this surgery are clearly visible on this page also, there is still more than enough storytelling and graphic power in it to qualify as genuine Pratt magic! A page filled with lingering tension...

And great art, of course: the portraits of young, nervous soldier Caleb Lee and the apparently impassible Sergeant sharing a dispassionate discussion in the woods are wonderful. So are the woods themselves: the grandiose ink-dominated scene of the second panel gives place to the ample, deep perspective of the large central panel, with the wood in ink wash. I suspect Gisela Dester (whose ink wash works are justly renowned and who assisted Pratt in the first episodes of Ticonderoga before taking over completely when he left Argentina in 1959) gave a helping hand here.

All in all, I'm happy to continue shaping up the Italian side of my collection, that has been clearly accelerating, this year of all years... After Bottaro, after Crepax, comes Pratt: not a bad year, I'd say...