The master of erotic comics Milo Manara brings to life Umberto Eco’s heretical thriller, The Name of the Rose, “a cathedral” of literature that he carved like a sculptor a block of marble. The first volume of this two-volume adaptation was published in May in Italy by Oblomov, immediately ranking number 1 in comic book sales. It will be released in September in French by Glénat.
“I found myself facing a cathedral. The challenge was to identify the load-bearing walls and remove stones without causing it to collapse, removing what was not essential to its stability, ”explains Milo Manara to AFP. “You have to carve, as Michelangelo said marble,” he said in a telephone interview from his studio near Verona, in northern Italy.
Umberto Eco’s bestseller, published in 1980 and translated into more than 40 languages, is set in 1327 and features Guillaume de Baskerville, a learned and rational Franciscan monk, who investigates a series of murders in an abbey in the Italian Alps, in the company of a young Benedictine novice, Adso de Melk. The story of the Italian writer and essayist is rooted in a barbaric Middle Ages, where the Inquisition tortured heretics who succumbed to lust, mystical doubt, hallucinations.
“The Middle Ages was a period of great scientific ignorance but rich in fantasies, a delirium of fantasies which made up for the lack of knowledge. With these fantasies, they invented what they did not know”, explains Milo Manara. Brought to the cinema by Jean-Jacques Annaud in 1986 with Sean Connery in the title role, The Name of the Rose has been adapted to the theater, to a TV series and should meet the opera in 2025 thanks to La Scala in Milan and the ‘Paris Opera.
Milo Manara lent the features of Marlon Brando to Guillaume de Baskerville. “We needed a strong figure after Sean Connery and Brando has this power in the collective imagination, in the same vein as Brigitte Bardot”, whom he sketched in watercolors snatching up today at exorbitant prices on the art market.
The first victim in the series of murders in the novel is Adelmo da Otranto, a young calligrapher employed to draw illuminations. Illuminations that lend themselves particularly well to comics: while the heart of the story is graphically dark, deliberately sober, the colors (made by Manara’s daughter, Simona), bright, exalt the reveries of Adelmo whose spirit and feather engender orgies of demons and humans devoured by violence and stupor. The Name of the Rose is an “extremely topical” novel, says Milo Manara. Accumulated in particular by the looting of the Inquisition, “the wealth of the Church in the face of the poverty of the people, that is to say the question of the concentration of wealth, we cannot make it more current.”
“There is also the vision of women, the cause of men’s perdition”, tempting women embodied in comics by the appearance to young Adso of a naked young red-haired woman who recalls the first artistic loves of the Italian cartoonist, author of erotic bestseller Le clic. And, implicitly, the sexuality of religious: “The trial of the [Catholic] Church is underway on this level, the compulsory celibacy of priests could be called into question,” says Milo Manara.
Legend of comics who collaborated with his friend Hugo Pratt and Federico Fellini, close to Georges Wolinski killed in the jihadist attack against Charlie Hebdo, he certainly says he reads contemporary comics, “but at my age [77 years old], I remains attached to the big names” of the 9th art, he admits, citing Moebius (Jean Giraud) or Jacques Tardi. “I am linked to the great authors who contributed to making comics what it is today, who gave it a rank, a cultural dignity that it did not have” before them.
