I Classici Del Fumetto Nr 01 Corto Maltese Today

He smiles. It is enough.

But somewhere, on the other side of the world, a magnetic mountain sleeps. And a dead U-boat dreams of the sky.

Inside the cave, the U-boat rests on a cradle of petrified giant clams. Its hull is scarred, but intact. And in the conning tower, embedded like a dark heart, is the : a sphere of rotating rings and mercury-filled glass tubes, crackling with silent blue lightning.

Corto lights a cigarette, the flame trembling in the humid wind. “Because, little Achille, a man who expects loyalty is a fool. But a man who offers it anyway… is a romantic. And the world has too few romantics left.” I Classici del Fumetto Nr 01 Corto Maltese

Tawaret fires her grappling hook, snagging a rocky outcrop outside. The line goes taut. Corto swings himself and the boy out of the cave just as the entire ceiling collapses, burying the U-boat, the Egg, and the greed of men forever.

The promise of the impossible is Corto’s only true addiction. He tosses a coin to the owner. “Find me a junk. And a reason not to throw you overboard halfway there, Cossack.”

Here is the story, presented as if it were the lead tale in I Classici del Fumetto Nr. 01: Corto Maltese . Corto Maltese “The Serpent of the Magnetic Moon” Venice, 1921. A damp fog clings to the canals like a ghost’s shroud. In a dimly lit trattoria near the Ghetto, a man sits alone. Gold earring, dark curly hair, a slight smile that has seen too much. He stirs his coffee, watching a drop of milk spiral into oblivion. He smiles

They are intercepted by a sleek British schooner. Aboard is , a pale, red-haired archaeologist with the eyes of a starving hawk. She is financed by a secret committee of London bankers who want the Serpent’s Egg to control the new oil routes in Persia.

The entire mountain begins to shake . The magnetic field inverts. The U-boat, the clams, the stones – all begin to fall upward , crashing against the cave’s ceiling.

Next issue: I Classici del Fumetto Nr. 02 – “Corto Maltese and the Cobalt Cipher of the Inca” And a dead U-boat dreams of the sky

“A German U-boat,” Rasputin whispers. “The U-196 . It vanished in ’18. But three months ago, a Malay pearl diver found it. Not on the seafloor, Corto. Inside a cave on a cliffside. A hundred meters above the water.”

His name is Corto Maltese. And he is already late for an appointment with destiny.

Corto raises an eyebrow. “The war is over, old friend. Let the Kaiser keep his rust.”

“Corto! Still chasing women and lost islands?”

As they sail past Borneo, Corto studies the chart. The “Magnetic Moon” is no moon, he realizes. It’s a – a mountain of lodestone that only becomes accessible when the real moon is at perigee, its gravity warping the local tides and revealing a hidden passage through the coral reefs.