By Milo Manara, translated by Tom Leighton (Catalan Communications)
ISBN: 978-087416-060-4 (HB)
For some folks the graphic novel under review here will be unacceptably lewd, even “dirty”. If that’s you, please stop here and come back tomorrow when there will something you’ll approve of but which will surely offend somebody else.
It’s another amatory Final Countdown moment and possibly a last chance to impress that significant one this year so let’s maturely and contemplatively review a rather quirky, philosophical – and typically unattainable – tome by one of the world’s greatest graphic eroticists. Originally translated into English from the French edition Courts Métrages by Catalan in 1989, it’s another inexplicably Out-of-Print graphic gem desperately in need of an English language release.
Maurilio “Milo” Manara (born September 12th 1945) has always been a puckish intellectual and whimsical craftsman with a dazzling array of artistic skills ranging from architecture, product design, filmmaking & animation, painting and of course an elegant, refined, clear-clean line style with pen and ink. He is best known for his wry, controversial and generally sexually explicit material – although that’s more an indicator of our comics market than any artistic obsession. He’s even drawn the X-Men – but mostly the women…
After studying painting and architecture he began crafting comics for money in 1969, beginning with Fumetti Neri series Genius, and thereafter working on the magazine Terror. His life’s goal came in 1971 as he began his “adult” career (see what I did there?) illustrating Francisco Rubino’s Jolanda de Almaviva which led, four years later, to his first major work and success. Originally released as Lo Scimmiotto, The Ape was a bold, bawdy reworking of the Chinese tales of the Monkey King.
By the end of the seventies he was working for the vast Franco-Belgian market where he is still regarded 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 raunchy burlesque and saucy slapstick, the eccentric selection of satirical, baroque tales gathered here as a barbed and penetrating assault on modern media and bastardized popular cultural, which were increasingly being used to cloak capitalist intrusions and commercial seductions.
In these absurdist, voyeuristic, fourth-wall breaking, intellectually-challenging, exceedingly sexy monochrome vignettes, Manara highlights the diminishing divisions between Art and Selling, with tales intended to make your head throb as much as your nethers.
The sensorial incursion commences with ‘Commercial’, as a typical couch-potato is inexorably drawn into the Casanovan drama he’s watching. However, the drama’s TV-contained characters are impeded in their roles by the intrusive presence of the sponsor’s unsavoury product: adult diapers…
All of these yarns are visually influenced by iconography of the Great Arts, like Luciano Pavarotti and Fellini, and ‘Blue Period’ details the ruthless nature of commercialism as a photographic director goes to extraordinary lengths to reproduce a Picasso painting for an album cover. Sadly, under normal conditions, the human body just don’t bend that way…
‘X3’ offers to reveal your sex-portrait with a brief questionnaire survey carried out by aliens well-versed in the techniques of abduction and probing whilst ‘John Lennon’ delightfully describes what happened after the master musician got to Heaven before ‘Acherontia Atropos’ plays a very dark prank on a cameraman who signs up to film a genuine snuff-movie…
‘Untitled’ returns to the role of unsatisfied Casanova as the legendary lover suffers an unquantifiable loss and surreal challenge to his life-style, whilst ‘The Last Tragic Day of Gori Bau & the Callipygian Sister’ sinisterly shows the dark side of “underage” explorations and pubescent curiosity when a trio of kids invoke feelings and powers they are not equipped to cope with. This comes from a far less sensitive time and might well be the most emotionally triggering tale here, so please read with care and your eyes and conscience open…
Our allegorical ambuscade concludes with the calamitously comedic surreal science fiction yarn ‘And’ as an Earthman and an Arcturian escape from a dying planet thanks to the power of a book which writes itself and predicts the future. If only the incredible chronicle had a spell-checker too…
Delineated in Manara’s beautifully rendered, lavish linework this explicit, daringly deep and sexually charged selection makes intriguing points of social and creative commentary in an utterly seductive and fascinating manner, but even at its most raunchy, funny and challenging this tome is first and foremost a work of sublime pictorial entertainment desperately worthy of a new edition.
© 1989 Milo Manara/Staletti, agent, Paris. English Language edition © 1989 Catalan Communications. All rights reserved.
Today in 1877 strip cartoonist Sidney “The Gumps” Smith was born as was Bud Blake (Tiger) in 1918 and letterer Danny Crespi in 1926. We lost The New Yorker stalwart Gluyas Williams in 1982 and the astounding Ron Embleton (Wrath of the Gods, Stingray, Biggles, Look and Learn, World of Wonder, Oh Wicked Wanda, those images in the closing credits of Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons).
The day also saw the beginning of Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant in 1937, Leo Baxendale’s The Bash Street Kids in The Beano in 1954 and the last Peanuts strip by Charles M. Schulz in 2000.