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Dark HorseMilo Manara is an Italian cartoonist whose style is similar to Moebius's except that instead of falling in love with sci-fi and fantasy he's obsessed with sexy ladies. Moebius drew sexy ladies too and Manara sometimes draws fantasy and sci-fi things. They both have uber-clean European line art sensibilities and are masters of comics. Dark Horse's last Manara offering Was Manara Library 1, which collected Indian Summer and The Paper Man. Both were kinda sexy comics but they didn't measure up to the content of this book, which collects the four Click books as well as Rendezvous in B-Flat and The Last Tragic Day of Gori Bau & The Callipygian Sister.
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Diana Schutz: This went the way most licensing deals go: The foreign rights holder—in this case, Panini in Italy—approached Dark Horse about us contracting for the English-language rights to Manara’s work. Panini had just published a 21-volume series entitled Manara: Le Opere (literally, Manara: The Works), a hardcover collection of most of Manara’s comics and illustrations. Panini wanted Dark Horse to purchase English-language publication rights to those volumes.The contract took quite a while to negotiate, as I recall. It seemed unlikely that American comics readers would go for twenty-one volumes of Manara, whose work has really only sporadically been seen in the U.S. since (the long-defunct) Catalan first published several of the maestro’s graphic novels back in the mid-80s—which, by the way, were my introduction to Manara. Anyway, the Panini books were also filled with a lot of single illustrations, which, though beautiful, aren’t comics. I was more interested in the comics work.
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I guess I have to say the latter, right? First, I should tell you that editors don’t actually have much say when it comes to pricing. In its earliest days, when a project is being considered for publication, editors can suggest a retail price. During the preliminary budgeting phase, the powers-that-be crunch numbers associated with projected costs and estimated sales, a process that results in the final retail price of the project—which, in this case, turned out to be a little higher than what I might have preferred, but these are expensive books to produce. Right from the start, we wanted to present Milo’s work in upscale packaging…. It just seems to me that Manara’s comics have too often been presented in lurid, or cheap, packaging that plays up the sexuality of his work at the expense of its incredible artistry. I wanted to focus on the artistry and reflect that in the entire package itself. I wanted something that looked damn high-class.
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When it comes to literature being published in any language other than the one in which it was originally written, the book lives or dies with the quality of its translation, and yet most readers—and even many publishers—don’t seem to realize that fact at all! In the case of comics, you can have the most pristine artwork imaginable, like Manara’s, but if the words read like a third-grader wrote them, then the story is destroyed. And comics, of course, are all about story, about words and pictures working in tandem to produce a narrative.Traditional English-language book publishers tend to hire translators whose first language is English and who can really write in English, but who are fluent in another language. So, for instance, great writers like Saul Bellow or Ezra Pound have also translated the works of other great, foreign authors into English. This doesn’t mean that the work is any easier. It’s not; literary translation is hard. It’s not just about finding the right words; it’s about voice and tone and linguistic and cultural differences, and preserving the meaning and spirit of the original without falling into the stiffness of literal translation or going too far off into your own narrative.Consolidating the job of comics translation into the hands of one person—someone who understands the medium as well as the foreign language—is clearly the best approach. Unfortunately, those people are really, really hard to find. I am so lucky to have Kim Thompson translating all 2,000-some pages of our Manara volumes. Not only does Kim thoroughly understand the comics medium, having edited comics for 30 years, but he speaks (I believe) five different languages and has extensive experience translating Euro comics. And because I speak French, read Spanish, and have now studied enough Italian to understand Manara’s work in its original language, I can legitimately provide the kinds of checks and balances on this project that an editor should. But without those language skills, Kim could get away with murder and I’d never even know!
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I met Milo Manara for the first time in the summer of 2010, not too long after we’d signed the deal to publish his work. It was, I believe, his first time ever at Comic-Con in San Diego; he was there to promote his X-Women one-shot with Chris Claremont. Chris is an old friend of mine—a former boyfriend, actually, from about a thousand years ago—and Chris introduced us at the Eisner awards ceremony. The next day, Milo and I met for a prearranged lunch to discuss plans for Dark Horse’s English-language editions, though lunch wound up being more of a social gathering than anything else: Milo was there with his wife and with his foreign rights rep, Sara Mattioli from Panini; I brought Dave Marshall, my consulting editor on the series, and Frank Miller, who really wanted to meet Milo. So, the talk tended to be more social than business. In fact, poor Sara was forced to translate everything from Italian to English and back again so that we could all communicate… until I asked Milo if he spoke French. He does. I do, too. That made conversation much easier!
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This is a good question, and personally I have struggled with some of the more hardcore visual elements of Milo’s work. But I think your friend is incorrect in her assessment. In fact, Milo worships women! His females are inexpressibly beautiful. By and large they’re strong characters, they’re directed, they’re focused, they stand up for what they believe in. In contrast to many of the males, who often seem to be victims of circumstance, weak, or at least bewildered, and sometimes downright creepy.
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Uh… no. Other than your friend who “angrily dismissed him.” Look, anyone who spends every day in a room all by himself writing and drawing Stuff That Isn’t Real is almost by definition tapped into something that the rest of us—with our mundane, workaday schedules, our grinding commutes, and our ceaseless barrage of meaningless business communications—just can’t begin to understand. Is Milo socially inept? No, he’s a fucking genius. People like him live in a different world than the rest of us.
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Well, Manara’s work has been around since long before the internet, but perhaps you’re right that the internet has made for greater acceptance. I guess I see Manara, instead, as part of a long tradition in the arts—in painting and sculpture—of portraying beautiful naked women. Certainly, society’s standards of “beauty” vary through time and culture, and Manara’s drawings and the medium in which he’s chosen to work—comics—are a more contemporary reflection of those standards. But… have you ever been to Italy? The museums are full of paintings and sculptures of naked women! And naked men! When I saw Michelangelo’s David, I wasn’t thinking of blowjobs—I was transported by the sculpture’s magnificent, inexpressible beauty! That statue brought me to tears. It was a little embarrassing to be standing in the Accademia, quietly sobbing.
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In fact, Ann Nocenti gave me my very first job in comics publishing, in 1984, as her assistant editor during the heyday of Uncanny X-Men. I didn’t last too long at Marvel, but that had nothing to do with Annie, who was kind and smart, and whom I really admired. I just wasn’t ready, in my twenties, to work for a midtown Manhattan corporation, especially after living in Berkeley, California, and I found a much better fit immediately afterward at Comico, one of the early independent publishing companies. The independents, as opposed to what we then called the “Big Two,” generally had more women in significant roles. Cat Yronwode, of course, was editor in chief at Eclipse in those days; Deni Loubert was still married to Dave Sim and was Aardvark-Vanaheim’s publisher, back when they had a few different titles on their roster and not only Dave’s work. Louise Simonson, another terrific editor, had already left a successful career at Marvel, after having previously worked at Warren, to become a full-time writer. I’m pretty sure Karen Berger was an assistant editor at DC by the mid 80s. DC/Vertigo’s Shelly Bond, who would become Karen’s assistant in the early 90s, began her comics career as my assistant at Comico in the late 80s.No, there really weren’t very many female comics editors in those days—witness the fact that I just named pretty much all of them! Thankfully, that situation has changed.Thanks for talking to me!----

