The Manara Library Volume 1: Indian Summer (1983) and The Paper Man (1982) (Collection 2011): written by Hugo Pratt (Indian Summer) and Milo Manara; illustrated by Milo Manara; English translation by Kim Thompson: Milo Manara is a wonderful artist though his penchant for erotica has sometimes overshadowed his strengths in the public eye. He's a sensitive and nuanced chronicler of the human form, but he also excels at placing that form within often spectacular visions of landscape or human chaos.
Indian Summer, written by European comics great Hugo Pratt, is a sort of homage by Pratt and Manara to the America of Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter. Elements of James Fenimore Cooper slip in with the story's take on the fraught relationship between English settlers and Native Americans, and with an opening rape scene of a puritanical English girl by two Native youths.
But that rape scene doesn't go stereotypically -- Pratt's emphasis, almost grotesquely so, is on the sexual and social hypocrisy that accompanies English claims of morality. It's an often disturbing tale, one in which Manara's loving attention to the female form sometimes seems to blur the line between reader and voyeur.
Manara takes the writing reins on the second story included here, The Paper Man. An often fabulistic story of settlers and Natives out West, The Paper Man accomplishes the tricky feat of being both funny and tragically elegiac.
Again, landscapes and the chaos of human battles are depicted beautifully and horribly when need be. In all, an extremely good volume with solid translation work, and probably the best one-volume introduction to Manara's work. Highly recommended.
The Manara Library Volume 3: Trip to Tulum and Other Stories (Collection 2011): including Trip to Tulum (1990) and The Journey of G. Mastorna (1992), both written by Federico Fellini, and The Ape (1976-1977), written by Silverio Pisu; all stories illustrated by Milo Manara, all other short stories written by Milo Manara: This volume of Dark Horse's [Milo] Manara Library gives us his collaborations with, and homages to, the great Italian film-maker Federico Fellini.
Manara's fine-lined, mostly realistic style actually works beautifully with the dream-visions of Fellini. Everything is rendered in great detail, and everything ultimately seems like a strange dream.
It's all somewhat hard to describe. Full-page illustrations of strange buildings and city-scapes on one page, harpies battling shamans on the next, an underwater landscape dotted with sunken airplanes representing all the film projects Fellini never got made, a lot of female nudity, a brief strip on the death of John Lennon...
And to top it all off, Manara's early collaboration with writer Silverio Pisu, The Ape (aka The Young Ape), a dream-like adaptation/reinterpretation of a Buddhist fable. In all, this is marvelous, weird stuff. Highly recommended.
Manara Erotica Volume 1 (1982-2012/ Collected 2012): written and illustrated by Milo Manara; translation by Kim Thompson; containing Click!, "Fatal Rendezvous," and "Piercing."
A few years back, Marvel drew criticism for having Italian writer-artist Milo Manara draw an, um, controversial cover for Spider-woman. Clearly Marvel thought this was a good idea. And they can't have been ignorant of the fact that Manara's biggest claim to fame has lain in erotic comics with a satiric bent for about 40 years and counting.
Everyone got worked up. Nothing was solved. Interest in Spider-woman reached an all-time high, which was almost certainly Marvel's motivation for the whole thing.
Of course, that Spider-woman is kid's stuff compared to the sexual material in 'non-erotic' Manara works that include Indian Summer, much less explicitly erotic comics as are collected in this first of three Dark Horse volumes of translated Manara erotica. Or Manara porn, depending on how you feel about these sorts of things.
An honest review should probably read something like Kevin Nealon's SNL bit reviewing a porn movie -- "Not interested, not interested, interested, interested, very interested, VERY interested, not interested, and then I went to sleep."
Manara is certainly a master of a certain type of idealized female form. As these stories come from the 1980's, the women often even have pubic hair, which probably looks archaic to younger readers. What is that stuff?
The women may be idealized; the men run the gamut from idealized to comic grotesques. The story of the main graphic novel here, Click!, is an occasionally quease-inducing masterpiece of... something. The basic plot involves implanting a computer chip in a prudish female celebrity's brain.
The chip, controlled by a black box that moves through the possession of several people, causes the celebrity (also married to a much older, prudish, grotesque politician) to become a sex-crazed exhibitionist. OK!
Suffice to say, no one ever fixes the cable in these stories. Highly recommended.
