Corto Maltese: Difference between revisions

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* [[All Myths Are True]]: Corto gets to meet mythical creatures from plenty of different folklores.

* [[Anti-Hero]]: Corto is an early example of this.

* [[Arbitrary Skepticism]]: Corto insists that Cornwall is a place of magic and that Malta is full of ghosts. But mystic powers in the Caribbean? That's just superstition.

* [[Armies Are Evil]]: Corto meets his share of power-hungry warlords and unsavory military officers.

* [[Asian Gal with White Guy]]: Played with in the case of the unfulfilled attraction between Corto and Shanghai Li. {{spoiler|She was already married and more or less happy with her husband, whom she basically describes as a [[Nice Guy]]. Corto ~~aknowledges~~ it and wishes her well.}}

* [[Asian Gal with White Guy]]: Played with in the case of the unfulfilled attraction between Corto and Shanghai Li. {{spoiler|She was already married and more or less happy with her husband, whom she basically describes as a [[Nice Guy]]. Corto acknowledges it and wishes her well.}}

* [[Badass Longcoat]]: Corto.

* [[Badass Normal]]: Corto acquits himself admirably in every dangerous situation, realistic or fantastic, although he is far from being infallible; sometimes, when the focus shifts to secondary characters, he is a little more than a bystander.

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* [[Mildly Military]]: Corto's default outfit is a navy uniform of no particular nationality (he once claimed to belong to the Venetian navy, but that was a lie he made up on the spot).

* [[Needle in a Stack of Needles]]: In [http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Celtiques#Burlesque_entre_Zuydcoote_et_Bray-Dunes "Burlesque entre Zuydcoote et Bray-Dunes"], the last story in "The Celtics", a killer disguised as a wooden puppet hides in a room full of similar wooden puppets.

* [[Older Than She Looks]] or possibly [[Really Seven Hundred Years Old]]: Gold Mouth looks "surprisingly young ... and yet there are very old women in Bahia who swear that she has always looked this way." She claims, too, to have known Corto's great-grandfather. He points out that this would have to make her over a hundred years old.

* [[Pirate]]: When first encountered in "The Ballad of the Salty Sea", Corto and Rasputin are pirate captains in the Indonesian archipelago.

* [[La Résistance]]: "Concerto in O Minor for Harp and Nitroglycerin" is about the Irish uprising against British rule.

* [[Ragtag Bunch of Misfits]]: Corto is often joined by characters so weird that they make even him and Rasputin look balanced by comparison.

* [[Red Baron]]: Corto meets the original one.

* [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism]]: The series is curiously impossible to classify, oscillating between a dream-like, nostalgic, elegiac tone on one hand and bitter, realistic ~~cynism~~ on the other. Corto himself can sound both like [[Spaghetti Western|the Man with No Name]] and a hopeless romantic.

* [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism]]: The series is curiously impossible to classify, oscillating between a dream-like, nostalgic, elegiac tone on one hand and bitter, realistic cynicism on the other. Corto himself can sound both like [[Spaghetti Western|the Man with No Name]] and a hopeless romantic.

* [[Sliding Scale of Silliness Versus Seriousness]]: a poignant, dramatic scene can be followed by a light-hearted one, often involving [[Comedic Sociopath|Rasputin]]. Strangely enough, it works.

* [[Shoot the Shaggy Dog]]: Some characters are liable to die pointlessly.