Milo Manara, a living legend of the comic, especially of the erotic, dares with another legend: with the semiologist and novelist Umberto Eco. With his most popular novel, The Name of the Rose, which he has turned into a two-volume graphic novel, the first of which has just been published by Lumen. Of course, the Franciscan monk Guillem de Baskerville does not resemble Sean Connery in the film adaptation, but rather Marlon Brando. And although Manara has long since left the erotic comic – which a few decades ago, he remembers, “had a liberating role” – and went towards the historical comic, he does not waste the beauty of the young peasant woman who dazzles newcomer Adso from Melk to return to the genre.
In Madrid, he remembers the “acuity, depth and irony” of Umberto Eco, with whom he had an unexpected falling out: the director of a comics magazine told him that Carlotta, Eco’s daughter, would be very happy if he gave him a strip by the adventurer Giuseppe Bergman, and, he remembers, “I gave him one that had a bit of eroticism in it. When I met Eco later, he pointed it out to me with a bit of reproach. I was 14 years old.” Now it was Eco’s children who wanted him to turn their father’s success into a graphic novel.
“It made me happy, but also scared”, he confesses, “but I couldn’t say no”. How can a novel with so many philosophical discussions be adapted into a popular film? “The most difficult thing – he emphasizes – was to leave the spirit. The book moves in many registers. There is the police part of the crime and the investigation, which had to continue, but this led to the discovery of books that talked about other essential books to understand the meaning of history and what the Middle Ages were like. And then there were the stories within the story, Friar Salvatore, with the strange face, narrates his life. And Ubertino da Casale, the 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 probably the true motive was to be a 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 were persecuted, and explaining this was essential”. And it was also, he says, “viewing the drawings that decorated the manuscripts, because they will be the reason for the homicidal fury of Jorge de Burgos. Neither in the book nor in the movie are they seen, and it was one of my strong points for doing the comic. I have taken the drawings of real psalteries of the timeâ€.
Regarding the fact that William of Baskerville looks like Marlon Brando, he says that “I wanted to quickly clarify that I am not starting from the film, to replace the image of Connery, who is very powerful, with another charismatic actor with a strong story , and that he was not alive and could refuse”, he smiles. “And in Eco’s description of Guillem, he talks about an aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, he fits better with Brando”, he adds. Regarding the luminous eroticism of the images of the young woman with whom Adso falls in love, he recalls that “Eco devotes many pages to her appearance, he uses very high, very lyrical words, words from the Song of Songs to describe the epiphany, the vision of the naked girl”.
Manara, whose next work is a 24-page Frank Miller-scripted comic about the Sin City universe for a collective book, believes that everything is culture, even politics. And that “the only battle that can succeed is cultural”. That’s why, he says, “in recent years I’ve been making 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 will contribute to a diverse cultural awareness.” The election of Meloni in Italy did not surprise him: “In recent years, Italians have no faith in politics and vote for the latest innovation. They started with Renzi, who proposed himself as the savior of the homeland. It disappointed and they voted for the 5 Star Movement. They were new and promising. The novelty now was Meloni, which will solve all the problems”. “And there are problems – he concludes – such as the progressive slide towards poverty even of those who have a job, something that had never happened before. Afterwards, Meloni promised to slow down emigration. It’s not true or possible, but it worked. And I think that emigration is moving all of Europe and the US to the right. It is underrated. And the left has denied the problem”.
