Edited by Vincenzo Mollica & Antonio Vianovi (Glamour International Productions)
No ISBNs
For some folks the graphic arts collections under review here will be unacceptably violent and/or dirty. If that’s you, please stop here and come back tomorrow when there will something you’ll approve of but which will certainly offend somebody else.
Maurilio Manara was born on September 12th 1945 and grew into an intellectual, whimsical craftsman with a dazzling array of artistic skills ranging from architecture, product design, sumptuous painting and of course an elegant, refined, clear-clean line style with pen and ink. He is best known for his wry and always controversial sexually explicit material – although that’s more an indicator of our comics market and sad straitened society than any artistic obsession.
His training was in the classical arts of painting and architecture before succumbing to the lure of comics. In 1969, he started his career in sexy horror strips with the Fumetti Neri series Genius, worked on the magazine Terror and in 1971 began his adult career illustrating Francisco Rubino’s Jolanda de Almaviva. In 1975 his first major work, a reworking of the Chinese tales of the Monkey King, was released as Lo Scimmiotto (The Ape).
By the end of the seventies he was working for Franco-Belgian markets as an A-list creator. It was while creating material for Charlie Mensuel, Pilote and L’Écho des savanes that he created his signature series HP and Giuseppe Bergman for A Suivre.
As the 80’s staggered to a close he wrote and drew, in his characteristic blend of bawdy burlesque and saucy slapstick, increasingly smart if eccentrically satirical and baroque tales during a devastatingly penetrating assault on modern media and bastardized popular culture; which were increasingly being used at that time to cloak capitalist intrusions and commercial seductions in the arts.
All of these periods are strongly represented in the books under review here. In 1984 and 1985 the Italian outfit which produced Popular Arts magazine Glamour Illustrated released a brace of fabulous art-books collecting and cataloguing the extant works of this maestro of mature modern sequential narrative (covering 1967 – 1985) which had limited distribution in Britain – despite the best efforts of specialist importer Titan Distributors – and these tomes are long past due for revision and reissuing…
These glorious compilations, 144 and 84 pages respectively (many of them full-colour high-gloss inserts), simultaneously transcribed in Italian, French and English, track the artistic development and display the incredible ability and versatility of an incomparable graphic stylist, with Milo Manara Glamour Book divided into early and ‘Unpublished Works’, ‘Black and White’ – printed pieces and extracts ranging from comics pages and panels, pin-ups, ads, illustrations, posters and covers – and concluding with erotic works dubbed ‘Nubinlove’.
The extensive central ‘Colour’ section reveals, in stunning glossy hues, his canon of covers for comics, magazines, books and records; posters, cartoons, animation model sheets and storyboards and paintings, plus many pages and extracts from his strips produced in Italy, France and America.
Milo Manara 2 Glamour Book was rushed out a year later due to immense public demand and, although finding a few delicious historical nuggets omitted from volume 1, concentrated on recently completed material, unseen sketches and draught drawings in its ‘Unpublished Works’ and ‘Black and White’ sections and included a ton of storyboards and design illustrations from the movie adaptation of his infamous sex-comedy ‘Le déclic’ both in monochrome and full colour, in a section which also displayed book, portfolio and magazine covers, calendar illustrations and advertising spreads.
Both collections also contain impressively comprehensive checklists which detail in full Manara’s vast publication record to date in their ‘Chronology’ and ‘Bibliography’ sections.
As you would expect there is a breathtaking amount of beautifully rendered flesh on display in an unrelenting series of lascivious situations but there is also a welcome glimpse into the scrupulous working practice of an artist equally renowned for his historical research and devotion to historical accuracy and authenticity… and his wickedly sly, dry sense of humour.
Milo Manara is a world class storyteller that English speakers have too long been deprived of and these beautiful books are desperately in need of updating and re-release, if only to supplement Dark Horse’s sterling efforts to popularise the Maestro through their Manara Library project…
No copyright notice so let’s assume © 1967-1986 Milo Manara. All Rights Reserved. If anybody knows better please let me know and we’ll amend the entry.