Milo Manara

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Milo Manara, byname of Maurilio Manara (born September 12 1945) is an Italian comic book creator (writer and artist), best known for his erotic approach to the medium. Image:Milo Manara tavola.jpg

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Biography

Manara was born in Luson, South Tyrol.

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 Belgian 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 rendered women helplessly aroused, and Il Profumo dell'invisibile (1986, translated as Butterscotch), about the invention of a body-paint which made 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 compatriot Tinto Brass, 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.

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