Nick Gazin's Comic Book Love-in #46

Hello Print Fanciers,

Someone put There's A Monster At The End of This Book online. I forgot how beautiful this is. That hand text is killing me.

This show is opening at the always relevant Boo Hooray Gallery in lower Manhattan tonight. It's called Artists' Book Not Artists' Book. 6 to 9 PM, free. Check the details here.

Did you see this comic that Victor Kerlow did for us on Sunday? Good comic.

There's this free downloadable Ebook of Adventure Time art. Download it.

Lisa Hanawalt made an amazing and illustrated review of the movie War Horse. I don't think the movie can be as good or entertaining as this review is. 

Here's this giant Peanuts comic that Charles Shiulz made for Look magazine in 1958.

Also, this new Milo Manara book is out…

Milo Manara Library 1
Milo Manara With Hugo Pratt
Dark Horse

I'm so jazzed that Dark Horse is collecting Milo Manara's comics into a series of nine hardcover volumes. This is exactly what Dark Horse should have been doing all along. The company ran into some financial troubles this past year and I could see why. Dark Horse was churning out fifty-dollar books that just didn't have much public demand. Choosing to reprint the work of Milo Manara was smart. Almost all of Manara's work has been out of print in America for decades and people are obsessed with him.

Milo Manara is an Italian cartoonist who first started getting published in the early 1970s. He's got a beautiful European comics style comparable to Moebius. Where Moebius is most known for surrealism, fantasy, and sci-fi, Manara's best known for his drawings of sexy women. For a long time this led to Manara to be lumped in with all the other porno comics, even though his comics are much better than just being comics that you can beat off to. It's not just his women that are sexy, everything he draws is sexy. The women, the men, the cars, the cities, the animals, the forests. There's a sensuality in everything he draws. A child trying to draw a sexy lady might start off with some boobs and then draw the rest of her as an afterthought. A lot of adults in the erotic art game are operating on a similar level. They'll draw a sexy lady but everything else will be bland. Milo Manara creates a sexy universe and at the center of the universe are the women with their beautiful Italian faces. I think they all kind of look like VICE's photo editor, Serena.

The first volume of Dark Horse's Manara Library contains two stories, "Indian Summer" (1982) and "The Paper Man" (1983). Neither of them is as dirty as the work he's best known for, but they're sexy enough for you, old man. Both comics are period stories set in America.

"Indian Summer" is a story about two camps of Dutch settlers and Indians in Connecticut. The story revolves around rape and incest tearing apart the fabric of society. The comic was written by Hugo Pratt, the creator of Corto Maltese and Manara's mentor. The book starts off with 14 pages of silence in which two Indians rape a white woman; then they are shot and the woman is rescued. It's a beautifully drawn and intense comics sequence. I might be oversimplifying the story but it's worth reading for the art alone and I don't think it needs to be overexplained.

The second story in the book is the "Paper Man." It's about a young man journeying through the desert, going up to Canada to meet his fiancee, whose photo he carries with him. On the way he meets a crazy old English man and a young American Indian woman who become his traveling companions. There are conflicts and they have an adventure. Like with "Indian Summer" there's not as much sex as your average Manara comic, but there's a lot of death and disappointment. Both of these stories are beautifully drawn and worth looking at again and again.

In February the second volume in this series is being released. It collects El Gaucho, the second book that Manara collaborated on with Hugo Pratt, and some comics that were never translated into English before. In May Dark Horse is rolling out the first volume of Manara's porno comics called Manara Erotica 1 which collects the four Click books. I could be wrong but I feel like the oversaturation of porn has led us to a place where we can enjoy Manara's work without seeing it as porno and just see it as beautiful.

Previously - Comic Book Love-in #45