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Rating: Milo Manara is one of the best Italian "topa" illustrators.
And this is beyond question. The sensuality and eros he manages to infuse into his drawn creatures is unmatched (Serpieri and his Druuna comes close), and the sensuality of his uninhibited heroines has made thousands of Italians (and others) across half the globe dream. The real limitation of the Venetian author, in my humble opinion, lies in the script and dialogues. Manara's books are purchased almost exclusively for the drawings because the script of his stories (by his own hand) is among the most lacking, clumsy, and inconsistent one can read. Temporal jumps, sequencing errors, dialogues on the verge of banality.
Let's take this "The Perfume of the Invisible" (from which, thanks to the success of copies sold, volume 2 will also be derived).
Apart from the core of the idea, not too new (citing "The Invisible Man" by H.G.Wells from 1881!!), the rest is a mix of clichés and little scattered ideas here and there in the story, which, as I suppose everyone knows, centers on what might happen if one day a scientist (ugly and mad... wow, what a novelty!) discovered a formula to become invisible.
The magical substance accidentally comes into contact with a beautiful topa (named Miele and who is the lookalike of the beautiful Kim Basinger after the success of "9½ Weeks"), who from then on will mix up all sorts of things just to allow the good Milo to indulge in titillating angles on the verge of the hard and voyeuristic aspects worthy of the worst (best?) sex-addicted pervert. This will unleash in little fragmented episodes, interesting from a graphic point of view but quite childish (in terms of cultural depth) concerning the narrative taste.
A work that, I repeat, he does divinely and let's not return to the figurative subject of the Master.
Manara is not Proust nor Hemingway, unfortunately, but having realized this, it would have been wiser and humbler to rely on substantial screenwriters who know how to write a sequence and make the dialogues interesting, because being comics, there's no written rule that they must be dedicated to semi-illiterate kids or middle school wankers, right?
The first episode of "The Perfume of the Invisible" was published in 1986 for the French magazine l'Echo des Savanes that commissioned it to Manara following the resounding success of "Click", perhaps his most famous work. A work that even in that case had nothing original in itself, except relying on the vaguely misogynistic desire to "control a woman's sexuality" through a remote control invented by the usual mad scientist (Wow... this seems familiar!!). But that's another story and someone will talk about it sooner or later.... :-)))
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