Milo Manara Collections (repost)

Borgia

The Borgias is an audacious, pretentious retelling of the wrath of Rodrigo Borgia and his family. It’s hyper-sexualized. It’s indulgently violent. It’s shocking for simply the sake of awing the readers in its ludicrousness. Regardless of whatever truth lies behind the history of the real Borgias family, the tone by which Jodorowsky handles his subjects is histrionic and unamusing. At best, The Borgias is a soap opera of a graphic novel, with all of the the same non-shocking twists and turns of closeted homosexuality, incest, murder, and love triangles. Written by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Art by Milo Manara.

Giuseppe Bergman

Giuseppe Bergman is the Candide-like protagonist of the works of Italian cartoonist Milo Manara. The anti-heroic Italian youth stars in four graphic novels (comic books) which are an ironic deconstruction of adventure stories and comic books as a medium.

The first adventure, later collected for publication as HP et Giuseppe Bergman (The Great Adventure in Catalan’s English translation), was originally serialized in the Franco-Belgian comics magazine À Suivre beginning in 1978. Giuseppe Bergman appears as a dissatisfied 20-something longing for adventure. Seeking it, he responds to the advertisement of a mysterious company which sends him to HP, "the adventure master”: a caricature of and homage to famed Italian cartoonist Hugo Pratt. Bergman finds himself confronted by hoodlums, rioters, white slavers, drug addicts, revolutionaries, and natives, but his adventures are bumbling disasters as he is consistently unprepared for the situations he encounters. In later adventures, collected in the graphic novels An Author in Search of Six Characters, Dies Irae, Perchance to Dream, and To See the Stars, Bergman’s frustrating adventures take him through Africa, India, and the world of European art. Themes of art and illusion, fantasy and frustration, responsibility and human nature run through the stories.

Milo Manara is best known for his erotic work. This is an aspect of the Bergman stories which, while originally making an intellectual point, gradually comes to take over the series as a whole.

Click

Click! is a series of erotic Italian comic books written and illustrated by comic book creator Milo Manara. It was first published in 1983 as Il gioco in the Italian Playmen and as Déclic in L'Écho des savanes in France. Three sequels have followed, in 1991, 1994 and 2001.

The first volume features an attractive but passionless woman, Ms. Claudia Cristiani, who is married to an older, rich man. After she is abducted by a scientist and a remote-controlled device is surgically implanted into her brain, its activation makes her become sexually insatiable. The three sequels roughly follow a similar story.

Butterscotch

Dark Horse’s complete presentation of Milo Manara’s internationally acclaimed erotic work concludes on a high note, with this deluxe, archival volume featuring one of his best-loved stories, “Butterscotch”! 

A physicist discovers a way to become invisible, but a curious ballerina easily tracks him by the smell of butterscotch! This volume also includes “Candid Camera,” “Gulliveriana,” “Three Girls on the Internet,” and more, all newly translated by Kim Thompson, as well as an essay by comics scholar Ben Saunders of the University of Oregon on the relationship between art and pornography.