Milo Manara: Saving the World Through Beauty and Eroticism

Talk about Milo Manara It is talking about eroticism, elegance, the cult of the female body, because if anything this Italian cartoonist has done, whose world fame came with the publication of the comic The Click, it is creating beauty, that concept that goes beyond the physical and that for him is what can “save the world”.

Paraphrasing the Karamazov brothers, Manara (Luson, Italy, 1945) advocates in an interview with EFE for beauty as a mechanism to “save” this world that no longer has some of those references that made it more livable: Hugo Pratt, Federico Fellini o Umberto Ecothe culprit, the latter for being in Madrid during the Book Fair to present the first part of the adaptation of The name of the rose (Lumen).

But Manara laments that not only are we not saving the world, but neither are we “saving beauty”. And the lack of these “great intellectuals” makes him pessimistic, since they could be a kind of lifeline in the face of “this cultural earthquake” that he believes the world is suffering.

“These are days – he explained – truly very difficult and we would have to commit to giving another development model because now the rich are richer, and the poor are poorer, we have a world full of plastic, we are on the wrong path (… .) If we don’t change, I think we’ll all go under“.

While waiting for the outcome of this future end of the world, Manara presents a two-year work that came into his life as a commission from the sons of Ecowho admired the work of his compatriot.

And although a priori the cartoonist’s universe has nothing to do with the darkness of the Middle Ages that tells The name of the rose he has managed to find that light that illuminates the eyes of his particular long-haired nymph-women in a story that it “departs quite a bit” from its figurative universe as it is full of “monks dressed in robes”.

“The Middle Ages are not so grey, and I think a new light shines on them., was the period where fantasy was most important in history, since where Science did not reach, which at that time was not very advanced, it was supplied with excessive fantasy. If Christopher Columbus set out for America, it was because he imagined it in a surprising way,” he said.

And for this reason, Manara demonstrates with his cartoons that there was light in the dark environment of that abbey from 1327 where this plot starring by the Franciscan William of Baskerville and the novice Adso de Melk.

So much so that he has been faithful to the original writings that Eco speaks of, even those that seem not to be from that time, clike the one of the woman collecting penises that are born from a tree and that seems taken from The Garden of Earthly Delights of El Bosco.

“It is important to know that this drawing is real”has warned with a laugh about this “extraordinary drawing” that goes hand in hand with his vision of eroticism, something that he identified when he was 16 years old and that he continues to defend today because it is something that “goes beyond nudity, it has a aesthetic value”.

so you don’t understand how the dead are seen in war pictures on TV and even nude pictures are avoided: “it is incomprehensible and unjustifiable”.

Aware that many people have in their heads Sean Connery as William of Baskerville and Christian Slater as Adso de Melk due to the adaptation that he made in 1986 Jean Jacques Annaud the Italian has fled from that imaginary and has chosen to give the face of Marlon Brando to the Franciscan and that of a young man with feminine features to Melk.

At 75 years old, Milo Manara is still at the forefront with the energy of that author who in the 1970s established himself with the monkey king (with script by Silver Pisu), The adventures of Giuseppe Bergmanand that already in the eighties he collaborated with Hugo Pratt in indian summer (1983) y The Gaucho (1995).

Therefore, this author whose fame became worldwide with the series erotic comics the click (1983)will be signing this book this afternoon and tomorrow at the Madrid Book Fair.