Milo Manara, a living legend of the comic, especially the erotic, dares with another legend: with the semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco. With his most popular novel, The Name of the Rose, which he has turned into a graphic novel in two volumes, the first of which just released Lumen. Of course, the Franciscan monk Guillermo de Baskerville does not look like Sean Connery from the film adaptation, but rather like Marlon Brando. And although Manara abandoned erotic comics a long time ago – which a few decades ago, he recalls, “had a liberating role†– and turned to historical comics, he does not miss out on the beauty of the young peasant girl who dazzles the novice Adso de Melk to return to gender.
On a visit to Madrid, he recalls the “witness, depth and irony” of Umberto Eco, with whom he had some unexpected tension: the director of a comic magazine told him that Carlotta, Eco’s daughter, would be very happy if he gave her a strip of his adventurer Giuseppe Bergman, and, he remembers, “I gave him one in which there was something erotic. When I later met Eco, she pointed it out to me somewhat reproachfully. It turned out to be 14 years old.†Now it has been Eco’s children who have wanted him to bring the success of his father to the graphic novel.
“It made me happy but also scared,” he confesses, “but I couldn’t say no.” How do you adapt a novel with so many philosophical disquisitions that has also been turned into a popular movie? “The most difficult thing was to leave the spirit. The book moves in many registers. There is the police part of the crime and the investigation, which I had to follow, but that led to discovering books that talked about other essential books to understand the meaning of history and what the Middle Ages were like, “she remarks.
“And then -he continues- there were the stories within the story, the monk Salvatore, with his strange face, narrates his life. And Ubertino da Casale, his experiences before the convent. In those stories a name scares everyone, Dulcino, who has been burned, and Eco makes it clear that he was accused of impiety and lust, but that his real motive was probably to be the leader of those who wanted the poverty of the Church.The Franciscans managed to be accepted into the Church at great risk, but the Dulcinians they were persecuted, and explaining that was essential.â€
And it was also, he says, “visualizing the drawings that decorated the manuscripts, because they will be the reason for Jorge de Burgos’ homicidal fury. You don’t see them in the book or in the movie, and that was one of my strengths in making the comic. I have taken the drawings of royal psalters of the timeâ€.
As for Guillermo de Baskerville resembling Marlon Brando, he says that “I wanted to make it clear quickly that I’m not starting from the film, to replace the very powerful image of Connery with another charismatic actor with a powerful story behind him and who doesn’t were alive and could refuseâ€, he smiles. “And in Eco’s description of Guillermo, he talks about an aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, he fits better with Brando,” he adds. Regarding the luminous eroticism of his images of the young woman with whom Adso falls in love, he recalls that “Eco dedicates many pages to her appearance, uses lofty words, very lyrical, words from the Song of Songs to describe that epiphany, the vision of the naked girlâ€.
Manara, whose next job is a 24-page comic book scripted by Frank Miller about the Sin City universe for a collective book, believes that everything is culture, even politics. And that “the only battle that can be successful is cultural.” For this reason, he says, “in recent years I have made comics with cultural ambitions, Caravaggio, the Borgias and, now, The Name of the Rose. Stories that speak of us, of our past, and I hope they contribute to a diverse cultural awarenessâ€. Meloni’s election in Italy did not surprise him: “In recent years, Italians have no faith in politics and vote for the latest news. They started with Renzi, who proposed himself as the savior of the homeland. He disappointed and they voted for the 5 Star Movement. They were new and promising. The novelty now was Meloni, the one that will solve all problemsâ€.
“And there are problems – he concludes – such as the progressive slide towards poverty even of those who have a job, which had never happened before. Later, Meloni has promised to stop emigration. It is not true or possible, but it has worked. And I think that emigration is displacing all of Europe and the US to the right. It’s underrated. And the left has denied the problem.
