Hugo Pratt was born in Rimini, Italy, in 1927 and died in Pully, Switzerland, in 1995. He published his first comic strip in 1945. From 1949 to 1962, he works from Argentina where he crosses paths with a number of important and diverse personalities ranging from Eichmann to Gillespie. His career reaches its pinnacle with the Corto Maltese graphic novels, which make him famous in France during the 1970ies. Against all prejudices of the bourgeois culture, he imposes the new genre of the graphic novel and himself as one of the great creators of our time.