‘Simbad’, the book illustrated with drawings by Hugo Pratt and edited by Fabrizio Paladini and Marco Steiner, has arrived in bookstores for Cong editore (112 pages, 18 euros). Simbad the sailor was a young and rich merchant who, after having squandered his family’s fortune, decides to make up for it by setting off on an adventure at sea. In his seven fantastic journeys, he will get to know men and cultures of distant countries, sea monsters, islands with floors covered in diamonds, he will meet cannibalistic peoples, snakes and sparrowhawks of enormous dimensions.
The sailor – we read in the note from Cong, a company that for years has managed the artistic work of Hugo Pratt, who died in 1995 – will sail and be shipwrecked like Ulysses, will defeat an army of sharks and giants who resemble Polyphemus, will become rich and will lose every his to have to remake himself and start again.
In this version the stories of Simbad are reported to Sultan Shahriyar by Sherazade, the girl protagonist of ‘The Arabian Nights’, who by telling these incredible adventures will drag that violent man into a vortex of fantasy that will distract him from his intent: to possess all the young women of the kingdom and then kill them only to take revenge for his wife’s betrayal.
The tables in the book are those that Hugo Pratt created in 1963 for the Corriere dei Piccoli, while Fabrizio Paladini, journalist and writer, and Marco Steiner, novelist and collaborator of Pratt, are two of the greatest connoisseurs of the soul and work of Rimini artist, creator, among others, of the character Corto Maltese.