José Muñoz was born in 1942 in Buenos Aires and from an early age he held pencils and colors showing an early passion for drawing and comics. He attended the "Escuela Panamericana de Arte" and Alberto Breccia and Hugo Pratt were his teachers. His debut dates back to 1963 with the detective series "Precinto 56" and in 1972 he left for Europe, touching London, then Barcelona and finally taking root in Italy. In 1974 he met the Argentine writer Carlos Sampayo, and the character of Alack Sinner, a private detective in New York, was born. He designed a long series of characters, stories and covers, he illustrated, among the various classics, “Pirates” by A. Conan Doyle, “El perseguidor” by Julio Cortázar, “The nine billion names of God” by Arthur Clarke, TS Eliot's Four Quartets, Albert Camus's The Stranger and First Man. Numerous awards, in 2017 in Lucca he won the Yellow Kid Award for the master of comics. He lives and works in Milan.
Marco Steiner born in Rome in 1956 is a doctor lent to writing, photography and the sea. He lives between Rome and New York. Interest in Corto Maltese began at the end of the 1996s when Hugo Pratt began to entrust him with philological research to give reality to the events of the protagonist of the successful comic series. In 2006 Steiner completed for Einaudi the novel "Corte Sconta called Arcana" left unfinished by Pratt and in 2014 he wrote the novel "L'ultima pista", an ideal continuation of "Tango". In 2016 his novel "Il corvo di pietra" was released with a young Corto Maltese for Sellerio editore. In XNUMX he wrote "Oltremare", Sellerio, finalist for the Salgari Prize.
Together, they presented the book "Mirages of Memory - Hypnotic itineraries along the path of Corto Maltese" published by Nuages on 25 October at the Sozzani Foundation bookshop.
Corto Maltese's stories are not just adventures, they are invitations to go beyond appearances with the imagination of the visions that spring from Hugo Pratt's drawings. This is what Marco Steiner has tried to tell, what lies beyond the images, fantastic journeys that start from real itineraries, an invitation to travel free and light beyond time and space. The magical realism of José Muñoz, his empty and full spaces, the jazz of his black marks and silences tell of another kind of Tango in the yard of a tire shop in San Isidro or the desolate journey of sailors who cross paths with a possible Corto Maltese. There is no precise time, there are moments, detours, changes of course to travel through a world of adventures with "Mirages of Memory". In an Argentine tango there is a phrase that says: “Today you will enter my past”. There are three tenses in these few words, the present, the past and the future. The book "Mirages of memory" is a bit like this: a future of emotions, visions and memories of hypnotic itineraries.
