Milo Manara

Milo Manara was born in Luson, a small mountain town near Bolzano, on September 12, 1945. Both his parents are workers, so Milo and his brothers start doing small jobs since their teenage years in order to be self-sufficient (when Milo was 12 he made decorative panels on commission). Following his natural inclinations, he graduates from a private art school. He moves to Verona where he starts working as an assistant to the famous Spanish sculptor Miguel Ortiz Berrocal and at the same time he applies for the Faculty of Architecture in Venice. The 1968 movement in Italy brings Manara and other artists, such as the painter Emilio Vedova, to strongly challenge La Biennale di Venezia. During this period Manara reflects on the social role of figurative art; by the coming of Pop Art in 1963 his artistic idea suddenly changes, shifting from the center to unpredictable and dematerialised directions. Between the Sixties and Seventies avant-garde artistic movements (Body Art, Minimal Art, Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, Kinetic Art, Land Art and Happenings) undermine the main structures of figurative art.

Manara, like his fellow artists, is not indifferent to the changes concerning his world, but he takes advantage of them to open his mind to new reflections. One day, thanks to Berrocal’s French wife, who brings from Paris the latest bandes dessinées released, such as Barbarella by Forest or The Adventures of Jodelle and Pravda by Guy Peellaert, Manara finds out about comics, that never interested him during his childhood and adolescence, partly because of his mother bans. What fascinates him is the production series of the medium, more similar to literature than to the uniqueness of a painting, considering also the comics affordable prices which allow more people to buy them. Manara sees comics as an opportunity to build his own role in the society, thanks to the wage standards in publishing that are more honest and closer to the economic reality that surrounds him than in the arts; so he decides to experiment this new language moving away from painting to embrace pop culture, closer to people (the painting where Manara himself is shown kicking a cow which stands for the figurative art, belongs to that period ).

In the late ‘60s he takes his first steps in comics publishing, he meets Mario Gomboli, already active in the arts field with Alfredo Castelli, who introduces him to the publisher Furio Viano, who will launch Manara as an author of erotic-cop stories belonging to the Genius series. Genius was in the first place a novel (the main character is a masked anti-hero inspired by Diabolik), then it turns into a comic book with the publication of Il morso della lupa, which will be released on newsstands on September 15, 1969 with art by Manara.

Later he will draw Jolanda de Almaviva, a famous sexy series. The pirate series of Jolanda will be on newsstands from 1970 to 1974, Manara will debut in issue 14 out on May 1971. Meanwhile, Manara drops out of college; thanks to the help of Castelli he starts his partnership with il Corriere dei Ragazzi, a weekly magazine of Corriere della Sera, where he draws comics written by Milo Milani, La parola alla giuria, concerning historical figures being prosecuted. In the same years he delivers Un fascio di bombe, a story based on the strategy of tension in Italy involving a series of covert attack on the population.

Right after that, Manara with Silverio Pisu, co-founder of the satirical magazine Telerompo, launches two important works for his career: The Ape and Alessio, which mark his debut as a comic book author. He works with the French publishing company Larousse, and creates some stories appeared in the collections L’Histoire de France en bandes dessinées, La decouverte du monde e L’Histoire de la Chine. During these years Manara finds his own style starting from the confrontation with a master of the Ninth Art: Jean Giraud/Moebius.

In 1978 he creates his first successful character and for the first time he is also credited as the writer of the story, published on the French magazine (A SUIVRE): HP and Giuseppe Bergman, where HP stands for his master and mentor Hugo Pratt, one of the main characters in the story; later he publishes some other stories dedicated to Giuseppe Bergman, who resembles both the author and Alain Delon (to whom Manara used to be compared to by some girls). These works will be published in Italy in 1980 on the first issue of Totem, a magazine published by Roberto Rocca.

Towards the end of the decade and the beginning of the 1980s he is one of the authors of Storia d’Italia a fumetti by Enzo Biagi and creates, for Playmen magazine, Click! a series of erotic Italian comics that gives him an unexpected worldwide success (a movie will be inspired by Click! with the beautiful Florence Guérin playing Claudia, based on the best-selling title known in France as Le Déclic that sales over one million copies).