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In 1980 a novel arrived in bookstores that would become one of the great literary phenomena of all time. In it, great literature, reflections on philosophy, as well as an investigation into a crime and that resonated with the stories of Conan Doyle starring Sherlock Holmes, went hand in hand. In this case, the detective did not have a pipe, but instead wore Franciscan garb. His name was William of Baskerville and he was the protagonist of “The Name of the Rose”, the great novel by the Italian semiologist Umberto Eco. It is estimated that by 2016, the year of Eco’s death, more than 50 million copies of the book had been sold. construction site all over the world, in addition to having fifty translations.
It was a spectacular success that also resulted in a well-known film adaptation, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery. Likewise, the small screen recently approached the work in a production with John Turturro in the skin of Guillermo de Baskerville.
The comic was missing, a land so close to Eco who dedicated quite a few pages to showing his fascination with characters like Superman, Snoopy, Flash Gordon or Steve Canyon. The Italian Milo Manara is the one who has been working this miracle for some time, transferring “The name of the rose” to cartoons.
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The revelation was made by Manara himself this month in the magazine “Linus”, an Italian publication dedicated to the world of comics and which has always had a special devotion to the work of the author of the series “El clic”.
It is not the first time that Manara has put himself at the service of a foreign text, as has already happened in his series “Los Borgias” with a script by Alejandro Jodorowksy, his collaborations with Hugo Pratt or his pencil approach to Federico Fellini’s cinematographic universe. However, the master of erotic comics gives himself up to one of his greatest challenges, as he himself acknowledges in statements to “Linus”. “The fact that this is a story almost entirely set in a monastery, with characters all dressed the same way, is certainly a challenge for an illustrator, who makes it a priority to always keep the visual aspect of the story interesting. . The theme of censorship, or how the pages of Aristotelian Poetics dedicated to laughter trigger the murderous madness of religious fanaticism, I would translate it from a visual point of view, devoting more space to the marginalia, the miniatures that offered an inverted vision of conventional reality, seen in Eco’s book as the trigger for the investigation»Manara declares that he is still working on this great project.
The little that has been made public, both in “Linus” and in the social networks of master Manara, allows us to verify that the cartoonist He has reserved some interesting licenses, although remaining faithful to what was created by Umberto Eco. The most striking decision is to draw the face of William of Baskerville as a mature Marlon Brando, a proposal that will make people talk. Interestingly, the protagonist of “The Godfather” was one of Annaud’s options to star in “The Name of the Rose” on the big screen.
It is not the only cinematographic wink that Manara has in store for us. In another of the released pages we can see that the abbot of the abbey of crime resembles the Oscar-winning Australian actor Geoffrey Rush.
In the aforementioned conversation with «Linus» Manara also tells how the adaptation of «The name of the rose» has been considered, «a book that has achieved worldwide success and has already had adaptations both in cinema and on television, so that carrying out a new transposition is undoubtedly a great challenge. Of course, I immediately thought that the comic itself is a book and, “The Name of the Rose”, in a sense, is a book about books. I thought that, unlike previous transpositions, we could expand on the theme by creating a book about a book that talks about books, continuing this crossover of quotes in an interesting matryoshka (nested Russian doll) game.”
Milo Manara does not dare to give a completion date for this work, but it is possible that it will begin to be published in installments in the Italian magazine before becoming a book. It is the great challenge of one of the best cartoonists of all time.
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