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Dave Knott on the Availability of English-Language Corto Maltese
posted December 1, 2005
 

NBM did album-sized translations of the following eight Corto Maltese books:

The Brazilian Eagle
Banana Conga
Voodoo for the President
A Mid-Winter Morning's Dream
Corto Maltese in Africa
The Early Years
Corto Maltese in Siberia
Fable of Venice

They also produced five comic books which translated Ballad of the Salt Sea, but did not release it as a graphic novel.

The British publisher Harvill has also produced two albums translating these:

Ballad of the Salt Sea
The Celts

All of the above books have been out of print for over 10 years, and are very difficult to come by these days. For instance, they typically command at least twice their cover price on eBay.

I'm pretty sure that Comic Relief does not have any of the album reprints. Or at least they didn't when I was there a couple of years ago (before they moved).

Corto Maltese is a series that is desperately in need of a new English edition. In addition to being out of print for so long, NBM's translations were particularly poor. It may be that the series didn't fare as well as it could have because English editions have had a very murky translation and did not read very smoothly.

If I were starting a company dedicated to translating classic European comics, Corto Maltese would be near the top of my wish list of books to publish.