Milo Manara

Milo Manara was born on September 15, 1945, in Luson, Italy. Like most Italian comic artists, Manara began his career at age twenty-four by churning out pages of fumetti—the cheap comic booklets that are a staple of newsstands across Italy.

Manara honed his craft and developed his style during the 1970s, moving from satire to children’s books, from fantasy serials to pirate tales. Nothing yet set him apart from the tight-knit group of his fellow laborers. In 1976, with Le Singe (The Ape, translated in France by Charlie Mensuel, among others), he produced his first truly personal artwork. This was followed by L'Homme des Neiges (Snowman) and, most notably, the puzzling HP and Giuseppe Bergman. The initials “HP” stand for none other than Hugo Pratt, to whom Manara paid his first tribute here. The two men were already friends. In 1981, Hugo Pratt returned the favor to Manara by writing the script for the magnificent Eté Indien specifically for him, followed by El Gaucho, which Manara would complete just before his mentor’s death in 1993. Manara created the artwork for the first volume of Le Déclic in 1983. The album immediately earned him a scandalous reputation—and immense success. With Le Déclic 2 (Click 2) and later Le Parfum de l'Invisible, he became THE erotic artist of the 1980s.

In 1987, Manara created the posters for Federico Fellini’s Intervista and La Voce della Luna (The Voice of the Moon), before illustrating two of Fellini’s unfilmed screenplays, Le Voyage à Tulum and Le Voyage de G. Mastorna (The Journey of G. Mastorna). On this occasion, the filmmaker wrote that “my friend Manara’s pencils, Indian inks and halftones are the equivalent of the staging, costumes, actors’ faces, sets and lighting with which I tell my stories in my films.”

Later, Manara drew inspiration from Gulliver’s Travels for his Gulliveriana, a very feminine and seductive alter ego of Jonathan Swift’s character. The first chapter of Aphrodite was released in 1999 with the illustration of Pierre Louÿs’ scandalous novel. Manara also produced a comic strip adaptation of an ancient erotic novel, The Metamorphosis of Lucius, for Les Humanoïdes Associés. 

The Borgia series was published in 2004 by Albin Michel. The Borgia clan conjures up a scandalous image for everyone: poisonings, Cesare Borgia the enlightened despot, Lucrezia the fatal and venomous beauty. Manara has set out to recreate this period of the Italian Renaissance that is so dear to him, and Jodorowsky offers us a saga built on historically recognized facts. Published by Albin Michel, The Kama Sutra reflects Manara’s unique vision of love. Based on a script by Vincenzo Cerami, he created The Eyes of Pandora (Pandora's Eyes), a diabolical thriller where family secrets are revealed amid fast-paced action... 

In 2020, Passion Femmes (Glénat) was published—an anthology of drawings dedicated to one of his favorite subjects: women. Two years later, he published his autobiography and, that same year, collaborated with Pedro Almodóvar by illustrating one of the filmmaker’s early works: Le feu aux entrailles. In 2023, he set to work on adapting Umberto Eco’s masterpiece, The Name of the Rose (two volumes published by Glénat), before illustrating Le Trompettiste (Glénat), based on the figure of the musician-soldier Giovanni Martini.