The Passion of the Cartoonist
Just in time for his 80th birthday, the Italian sex comics genius Milo Manara has finished a two-volume graphic biography of another famously libidinous artist: 'Caravaggio: The Palette and the Sword.'
The books are, in many ways, Manara's theory of his own work, and Caravaggio is his stand-in: 'Ecstasy is ecstasy, regardless of where it comes from,' the great painter declares to one of his models on one page. The girl is teasing him for portraying her as his 'Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy' from a sketch he made while she was masturbating, but Caravaggio and Manara are both adamant: It is the passion itself that matters, not whether it happens to be carnal or devotional.
Manara defies easy categorization; or rather, he invites conflicting characterizations. He has worked on both DC and Marvel Comics characters and drawn dream-logic comics with the film director Federico Fellini, all using the same virtuosic line.
But he's best known as an especially unrestrained pornographer, one whose smut often ranges into literary territory. There's a gender-swapped version of Jonathan Swift's satire 'Gulliver's Travels' and an adaptation of the ancient Roman writer Apuleius' bawdy novel 'The Golden Ass' in his bibliography. (The word 'ass' refers to a donkey here, for what it's worth.)
In Caravaggio, Manara has an especially appropriate subject for his attentions: a horny scoundrel who painted some of the most transcendently beautiful images of Christian faith ever made. (He often tried to use them as bribes to stay out of prison.)
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