The January 2022 issue of linus magazine announced that Milo Manara, Italian maestro of erotic comics, was working on an adaptation of the novel The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, the late Italian philosopher, novelist and comics scholar. Eco had a long association with linus, founded in 1965 and named for the Peanuts character; in its very first issue, Eco published a memorable interview with writers Oreste Del Buono and Elio Vittorini about Peanuts and its place in the history of American literature, among more general comics topics. Of course, linus would become an institution, publishing Schulz's strips alongside all manner of classic and modern comics.
Today the magazine is directed by the comic artist Igort, co-founder of Coconino Press and current chief editor of Oblomov Edizioni, the latter of which published the first volume of Manara's adaptation (a second, concluding volume is forthcoming) in the spring of 2023. A French edition of the first volume was published by Glénat the following September. At the moment, I do not know of plans for an English translation; this review is based on the Italian-language original.
The idea of a comics version of Eco’s novel first came from Igort and Elisabetta Sgarbi, chief editor of the publishing house La nave di Teseo (which publishes linus), who asked Manara to do it, knowing from Eco’s son how much his father appreciated Manara’s work. Published in 1980, The Name of the Rose was the biggest seller of Eco's career - indeed, one of the few international bestsellers of modern Italian literature. Some may know it best through a 1986 Sean Connery movie vehicle from French director Jean-Jacques Annaud; it later inspired a less-fortunate 2019 television miniseries featuring John Turturro, produced by Italy’s Rai Fiction and Germany’s Tele München.
Adapting Eco's novel has never been an easy task. The Name of the Rose is styled as a book within a book; Eco starts his novel by telling us firsthand of a 19th century manuscript he allegedly found, which purportedly reproduces a 14th century narrative concerning two Franciscan friars—William of Baskerville and his novice, Adso of Melk—who arrive at a Benedictine abbey in Northern Italy, where a mysterious death had shocked the community of holy men. It falls upon William to unravel the mystery, which soon involves other murders and attracts the attention of the Inquisition. But the story does not find its greatest power in the beat-by-beat narration of events; rather, the text is molded from many layers, particularly Eco’s vibrant dissertation on the meaning and importance of language and knowledge. Such intricate, virtuosic writing is difficult to translate into images. One would probably need to create an elaborate discourse on visualized language, as David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik did in adapting of Paul Auster’s City of Glass - but I’m not sure that was Manara’s intention. When stripped to the basics of its plot, The Name of the Rose can be honed down to a crime story, a murder mystery in a medieval setting. This is how the Annaud film operated; fascinating and well-interpreted as it was, it only granted us a tiny glimpse of the greater themes of Eco's work. Manara appears to be following in kind, though he draws William as Marlon Brando instead of Sean Connery.
Even the very basic idea of reducing such a thick and dense novel into a pair of comic albums, less than 150 pages in eventual total, can be quite suspicious and worrying. I usually don’t like to use words like “reduction” when describing an adaptation of a work of fiction from one medium to another, because this can be unfair to the new incarnation, but in cases like this it can be illuminating. I find the novel intriguing mainly for its flamboyant descriptions, for the rich and creative use that Eco makes of language, so it’s easy to understand how cold my first impression of this book may have been. Eco’s writing is so abundant and evocative that it seems like there is no reason to add images to it; mere faithful illustration can only repeat the qualities of Eco's text in a simplified and less beguiling form. Moreover, this is a story where almost all characters are monks - all those Manara girls are at risk of unemployment!
Nonetheless, this first volume has proven an unusual popular success. It debuted to much attention at the Napoli Comicon 2023 (April 22nd-25th), and was the eighth best-selling Italian book release in its first week of general sales. It is quite rare in Italy to see any comic other than a very popular manga or children's series appear so prominently on the general fiction sales lists. The book was again a bestseller when published in France, with fans waiting in long lines at Manara’s signing events across the country.
This is quite a unique project for Manara. Across his long career, the 78-year old artist has often worked with scriptwriters, but this is his first adaptation of a novel - not one that particularly accommodates the adventurous and sexy style he is known for, of which I confess I am not an admirer. However, in some ways—visually, for the most part—Manara's comic of The Name of the Rose is of a type with the scrupulously detailed two-part biography of Caravaggio on which he spent much of the 2010s. Eco's story takes place inside an ancient monastery in the 14th century; many pages are spent describing this massive, scary, impressive architecture, which Manara translates to some very large and handsome panels. Manara's daughter Simona does a pretty good job with the colors, which are interesting and evocative; dark, grayish and dense, they make for an appealing departure from the naturalistic color we usually see on Manara’s pages.
On the other hand, Eco's enthusiasm for historical detail translates to ramparts of text at sizes rarely seen outside of Blake and Mortimer; this appears to be a side-effect of compressing a straight and to-the-point rendition of the plot into a very limited page count, which presents the dual disadvantage of literally obscuring the appeal of Manara's art while still inevitably sacrificing some of Eco's zeal for detail. Moreover, when lacking recourse to the impressive proportions of the monastery and its surroundings, Manara leans on frequent close-ups of monks or objects, which creates a type of narrative repetition very much unlike Eco's book, with its rich yet fluid writing style, or even the 1986 movie, in which Annaud paid incredible attention to Sean Connery’s facial expressions and body language, suggesting a variety of interpretations for every little glance or movement. The comic doesn’t have any such depth; it reads a bit like a homework assignment, and ends up betraying maybe a little conceptual laziness from an artist who is still considered among the most important to the Italian comics scene. Certainly it has only strengthened my personal aversion towards graphic novel adaptations of works from other mediums.
