France, 1968 “Adult” comics are everywhere. Folklore heroes of the Franco-Belgian school, Asterix and Tintin, see a strong dose of America burst in from the West and win over a large part of their audience. At last year’s Monterey festival, Jimi Hendrix set fire to his guitar on stage, Vietnam took on more American bombs than Europe during World War II, and a new vision of the world of young America, diluted with a lot of psychedelia, hit the streets. Paris.

In this fertile, explosive climate, French comics are enjoying a renaissance, with anthology magazines like Metal Hurlant, L’echo des Savanes or A Suivre destined to become legendary. This is the beginning of the great flowering of European comics (which will reach its peak in the 80s) and is represented by French creators such as Mobius (née Jean Giraud) and Philippe Druyer, English master Don Lawrence and Enki Bilal, Yugoslav. who lived in Paris. They all paint evocative science fiction worlds with bold doses of sex, violence, and designs so imaginative, so innovative that readers on both sides of the Atlantic have never seen before.

Other sub-genres will soon emerge, such as the historical drama, with its great exploration of historical data (its great exponent is Hugo Pratt and his world-famous hero, the sailor Corto Maltese), and the western, with popular characters such as the cowboy. Blueberry” created by Jean Giraud. And then there will be erotic comics called Eurotica, made famous mainly by two Italians, Guido Crepax and Milo Manara. Today we’re going to talk about the latter here, and the reason for this was his brilliant, delightful autobiography that was recently released.

When we pick up the “Self-Portrait” of the great Italian cartoonist (published by the CPSM, 2022), we immediately understand that we are waiting for a reader experience that is as rich as the life he describes. The edition is generous, as is its content. It has thick illustrated paper on the cover and heavy pages of “writing” paper inside, while illustrations (mostly taken from the author’s personal archive) are more than generously scattered across the (just over two hundred) pages of content. The flow of text is also structured in such a way – in small, easy-to-read, self-contained chapters – that, combined with the richness of the images, makes the publication a continuous and leisurely read. As for the translation of Christos Siafkas, it is imperceptible, therefore successful: we forget that we are reading a text written in Italian. The “Fourth Wall” never falls, and we enter the life of Milo Manara forever. We live it next to him, in small episodes, incredible and exciting stories, anecdotal incidents from a life that in itself seems like material for a long comic strip.

Something that becomes apparent to us from the very beginning of the reading is the ease of Manara’s writing. In the first chapters of his memoirs, talking about his place of origin, the Dolomites, he starts, describing them, phrasal fireworks as a demonstration of power: “Cathedrals carved into bright rocks, on which ancient myths and epics of imaginary peoples and creatures flourished” will write impressively. He talks with vivid memories full of love about the two pillars of his childhood: books and women. Books that were in abundance in his house (and in which he admired the illustrations of the great masters of the interwar period, such as the Ukrainian-Italian Vsevolod Nikulin), and the presence of women. “We were even numerically: three sons and three daughters, father and mother. Four by four,” he says, adding, “But other than that, male dominance was something completely foreign to us. Both of my parents worked and I think my mother earned more than my father. Rights and responsibilities were divided.” Images and words in books and women, strong women: the starter for the creative future of Milo Manara, where strong heroines in ink stars – everything was there, under the Dolomites.

But apart from intense lyricism, his writings are often tinged with humorous self-mockery: in the chapter “How not to become an architect” (where he tells us about his attempt to study architecture at the famous Academy of Fine Arts in Venice), he admiringly mentions the following: “At first I thought that all architects are like Le Corbusier. That they are working on creating cities of the future or designing unique buildings. I quickly realized that they spent their days in councils with various building committees and that they were up to their necks in the bureaucracy. Of course, this job was not for me.”

“For me, erotica must essentially be a cultural reworking of sex in order to acquire a positive meaning. Become a conscience,” he writes in his Self-Portrait.

Indeed, his need for freedom is another element that characterizes his memories. The same freedom that he sought in his European trips in his car (the first thing he acquired with his first satisfactory fees as a cartoonist) and which actually reached him even in Greece, on the coast of Chalkidiki. His freedom to work as his own boss, to choose hours, workplace, collaboration, but also the freedom with which he instilled in the two protagonists of his later works, Meli and Giuseppe Bergman, two characters in which he saw himself.

Talking about Meli (the heroine of the story “The Smell of the Invisible”, published in Greece by the publishing house “Bavel” in 1987), she characteristically mentions: “Freedom is her greatest virtue. She is free from prejudice, she has no prohibitions. She lives her sexuality freely. It is a subject, not an object,” he tells us, continuing with two sentences that universally interpret the element of eroticism in his work: “For me, erotica must essentially be a cultural interpretation of sex in order to thus receive a positive meaning. . To become conscious.”

And yet, it often seems to us that it is not he, but two other people who claim the leading role in this autobiography. Two giants of post-war artistic Italy, who became mentors and lifelong friends for him: Hugo Pratt and Federico Fellini. The stories we read about the legendary Venetian writer and cartoonist (who always called him “the master”) are shocking, and Fellini is described in almost religious terms. After all, for him it was “an abstract entity, almost like a deity, who from time to time from somewhere above gave us ordinary mortal masterpieces,” as he characteristically notes.

But Hugo Pratt and Federico Fellini were not the only greats who crossed his path. He has also worked with (among others) Alejandro Jodorowsky, Adriano Celentano, Luc Besson, Neil Gaiman, Nicolas Piovani. Milo Manara was the one who met the most important people, who won. The one who, as we say, “did everything.” And yet he didn’t care about all that, because he really cared about drawing and storytelling.

“Yes, I have seen and experienced the wealth of the truly rich,” he writes in the final chapter of the publication, continuing: “I am no longer cold and not hot. It doesn’t impress me, especially the nouveau riche.” And it will end with a resounding, not accidentally appeared on the back cover of the publication, the phrase: “If the richest man in the world told me:“ I will offer you all my goods in exchange for your ability to design, ”I would answer him in the negative. I would tell him, “Keep your wealth, because my life is a plan.”

The photograph accompanying this last chapter shows the great cartoonist in his studio near Verona, in the Veneto region of northern Italy. He has art books around him, watercolors in front of him, and one of his signature sketches in progress. He is now 77 years old and looks like he wants to keep painting. “My future is still a blank page,” he says.