Milo Manara

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Milo Manara

Milo Manara
Birth name Maurilio Manara
Born September 12, 1945 (age 61)
Luson, Italy
Nationality
Italian
Area(s) artist, writer, penciller, inker
Notable works The Adventures of Giuseppe Bergman
Butterscotch
Click
Indian Summer
Awards 2004 Eisner Award

Milo Manara, byname of Maurilio Manara (born September 12, 1945 in Luson, South Tyrol) is an Italian comic book creator (writer and artist), best known for his erotic approach to the medium.

Contents

[edit] Biography

After architecture and painting studies, he made his debut in the comics world in 1969 for Genius, a noir/sexy comic book in the wake of Kriminal and Satanik. He worked for minor publishers (Jolanda, a soft-core comic book, and the satiric magazine Telerompo) until he was called by Il Corriere dei Ragazzi to work with writer Mino Milani. His first story as a writer is HP and Giuseppe Bergman of 1983. "HP" is his friend, the Italian artist and cartoonist Hugo Pratt. Bergman had been created by Manara five years earlier, for the French comics magazine (A SUIVRE).

His cartoons generally revolve around elegant, beautiful women caught up in unlikely and fantastical erotic scenarios. Some of his more famous books include Il Gioco (1983, translated as Click) (in four parts), about a device which renders women helplessly aroused, and Il Profumo dell'invisibile (1986, translated as Butterscotch), introducing the heroine Miele (Honey), about the invention of a body-paint which makes the wearer invisible. Some of his most acclaimed books were collaborations with Hugo Pratt. The Ape, serialized in the Heavy Metal magazine in the early 1980s, retells the story of the Chinese Monkey King - with humor, sexy artwork, and political overtones.

Manara's style favors clean lines for women reserving more complex drawings for monsters or other supernatural elements. Like his compatriots Tinto Brass and Leone Frollo, he evidently has a fixation with the female buttocks. Many of his comics have themes of bondage, domination and humiliation, voyeurism, the supernatural, and the sexual tension beneath various aspects of Italian society. The works vary in their explicitness, but the general mood is playful rather than misogynistic. Manara's skill in creating atmosphere, his obvious talent, and his occasional excursions into more "mainstream" stories, have helped to give him an air of artistic respectability.

His work reached an American audience largely through its appearance in Heavy Metal magazine. Curiously, Manara is less popular in Italy than in France, where he is considered one of the most important cartoonists in the world.

In July 2006, Manara designed a helmet for Moto GP rider Valentino Rossi, specifically made for the Italian GP in Mugello. Rossi declared:

“ He has drawn some kind of a mythical history of my life, in cartoons, with some of my heroes such as Steve McQueen, Enzo Ferrari, Jim Morrison, and other characters such as my dog Guido, the chicken Osvaldo and a lot of beautiful women! I really like Milo...he's a person that I have admired for a long time. ”

Manara is slated to pencil an X-Men project written by Chris Claremont for Marvel Comics.

In October 2006, Manara developed character designs for the animated television series City Hunters. The series, of ten 11 minute episodes, blends tradicional animation techniques with the latest generation of CGI. It will be broadcast across all of Latin America on the FOX network throughout 2006 and 2007.

[edit] Partial bibliography

The Women of Manara cover
The Women of Manara cover
  • Aphrodite: Book 1 (with Pierre Louys)
  • Bolero
  • Borgia 1: Blood for the Pope (2006, (with Alejandro Jodorowsky)
  • Borgia 2: Power and Incest (with Alejandro Jodorowsky)
  • Breakthrough (1990, with Enki Bilal, Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, etc)
  • Butterscotch
  • Butterscotch 2
  • Casanova
  • Click
  • Click 2
  • Click 3
  • Click 4
  • El Gaucho (with Hugo Pratt)
  • Fatal Rendezvous
  • Gulliveriana (based on text by Jonathan Swift)
  • Hidden Camera
  • Il Viaggio Di G. Mastorna, detto Ferne (1995, also credits Federico Fellini)
  • Indian Summer (with Hugo Pratt)
  • Kama Sutra (based on text by Vatsyayana)
  • Memory
  • Piranese: The Prison Planet
  • Revolution
  • Seduzioni (with Pedro Almodovar)
  • Shorts
  • The Ape (with Silverio Pisu)
  • The Art of Manara
  • The Art of Spanking
  • The Golden Ass (based on text by Apuleius)
  • The Model
  • The Paper Man
  • The Sandman: Endless Nights (by Neil Gaiman)
  • The Snowman
  • Trip to Tulum (with Federico Fellini)
  • Women of Manara
  • WWW - Wendi, Wilma, Wanda
  • The Adventures of Giuseppe Bergman:
    • An Author in Search of Six Characters: The African Adventures of Giuseppe Bergman Part 1
    • Dies Irae: The African Adventures of Giuseppe Bergman Part 2
    • Perchance to Dream: The Indian Adventures of Giuseppe Bergman
    • The Great Adventure: HP and Giuseppe Bergman
    • The Odyssey of Giuseppe Bergman
    • To See the Stars: The Urban Adventures of Giuseppe Bergman

[edit] Adaptations

  • Series
    • Click (1997 IMDb)
    • City Hunters (2006, animated TV series created by Gastón Gorali & Alberto Stagnaro)
  • Films
    • Le Déclic (1985 IMDb)
    • Le Parfum de l'invisible (1997 IMDb)
    • La Légende de Parva (2003 IMDb)

[edit] Awards

[edit] References

    [edit] External links

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