Pilar Martin |
Madrid (EFE).- To talk about Milo Manara is to talk about eroticism, elegance, the cult of the female body, because if this Italian cartoonist, whose worldwide fame came with the publication of the comic “El Clic”, has done anything, it is create 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) advocated 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 or Umberto Eco, the latter to blame 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 regrets that not only are we not saving the world, but also “we are not 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 thinks 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”.
Awaiting the outcome of this future end of the world, Manara presents a two-year work that came into his life as a commission from Eco’s children, who 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 “The Name of the Rose” tells, he has managed to find that light that illuminates the eyes of his particular long-haired nymph-women in a story that is it “distances 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. It was the period where fantasy was most important in history, since where Science did not reach, which was not very advanced at that time, it was replaced with wild fantasy. If Christopher Columbus left for America it was because he imagined it in a surprising way ”, he has affirmed.
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 the Franciscan Guillermo de Baskerville and the novice Adso de Melk takes place.
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, such as the one about the woman collecting penises that grow from a tree and that seems to be taken from “The Garden of the Delights” by El Bosco.
“It is important to know that this drawing is real”, he 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 “It goes beyond nudity, it has an aesthetic value.”
So he doesn’t understand how dead people are seen in war pictures on TV and even nude pictures are avoided: “it’s incomprehensible and unjustifiable”.
Aware that many people have in their heads Sean Connery as Guillermo de Baskerville and Christian Slater as Adso de Melk due to the adaptation made in 1986 by Jean-Jacques Annaud, the Italian has fled from that imaginary and has chosen to give him the face of Marlon Brando to the Franciscan and that of a young man with feminine features to Melk.
At 75, Milo Manara is still leading the way with the energy of that author who in the seventies established himself with “The Monkey King” (with a script by Silverio Pisu), “The Adventures of Giuseppe Bergman”, and who already in the In the eighties he collaborated with Hugo Pratt in “Verano indio” (1983) and “El gaucho” (1995).
For this reason, this author whose fame became worldwide with the erotic comic series “El clic” (1983), will be signing this book this afternoon and tomorrow at the Madrid Book Fair.