I’m sorry, there is simply no honest way to talk about this comic without evoking truly gross language. “Mommy milkers” may be the most odious turn of phrase to matriculate its way up into the broader internet idiom from the depths of porn-addled forum posters, but Miguel Vila’s Milky Way is a comic about men who love pornography and the woman they suggest might excel producing work within one particular niche of it. There’s a fella in this who wants the woman he’s seeing to wear a cow mask in the fetish pornography he uploads of her. She buys a kitten mask instead, her own tastes in cuteness and self-image at odds with the cartoon sexuality she’s encouraged to perform.
How refreshing it is to read a comic that has a few characters it follows and fleshes out adequately, operating at cross-purposes to each other. The barest requirements, really, of dramaturgy or comedic writing, but so often unfulfilled in comics. The desires that motivate our three leads are sexual, emotional and economic by turns; it is the latter vertices of power and insecurity that separate our scenario from fantasy, grounding us in realism.
Despite her blonde youth, no one suggests to Stella that she should make pornography. Her friends ask her why she’d want to work at all. Secure in her class position, she gives her parents’ money to her boyfriend Marco so that he can learn to drive. Assured of her desirability, she mocks other women behind their backs for being fat, communicating her disdain in text messages. For whatever issues the two of them might have in the bedroom, as Marco struggles to get it up, they still share that particular intimacy where a partner bears witness to the mean side of oneself that’s kept a secret from the larger friend group. Marco keeps Stella’s secrets, and his own: his taste in pornography points to a more expansive set of desires than the narrowly prescribed idea of youthful beauty Stella possesses and takes for granted.
He is particularly turned on by large, lactating breasts. This is where the title of the book comes into play, to be reinforced by a series of visual puns stacked on top of each other. Ludovica, the single mother that catches his interest, has a pendulous bosom. When she introduces herself to Marco, her nipples drip drops of milk, visible through her blouse. She also works at an ice cream parlor named Milky Way. The title page of the book shows a drippy sundae, three scoops heaped over a banana, two flavors melting onto the countertop. A sequence of driving through the countryside makes time to capture looking at a cow. Another page focuses on the pouring of a cup of coffee, and the pouring of milk into it. Vila seizes his imagery and milks it for all its worth, calling attention to the substance’s omnipresence in adulterated form, alienated from the maternal mammal.
Despite the way the plot outline suggests you slot the book into the “erotic thriller” category, Milky Way is not particularly hot stuff. It is about sexuality and desire as a thing pornography captures and then sets its consumers to replicating - whether through choking sex, pierced nipples and a shaved pussy, or a woman lactating into a male partner’s mouth. There is enough distance granted to these acts by choices in framing that readers will likely not feel aroused. Instead they will think, hey, this kinda looks like Chris Ware. We get a lot of small square panels, offering an unchanging perspective, focused on a person’s face as they have a not-great time, while other persons enjoying themselves are unseen, off-panel. A similar approach captures the other deeply unsexy aspects of these characters’ lives: the tedious arguments of the young couple; the casual approach to drinking and smoking, bad for a breastfeeding baby, by the indifferent mother. We witness these figures as if they are grotesques - not invited to masturbate to them, or to laugh at them, but to empathize with the ugliness of their need.
Vila balances his incisiveness with a real love for drawing, and a color palette that prioritizes clarity. Pastel-bright, the characters radiate the vulnerability shown etched onto their faces. While it is easy to see Ware in the approach to paneling, the overhead views of cars moving into the streets, the linework and character design, is closer to Dave Cooper or Anders Nilsen: emphasizing wrinkles, the lines around eyes, people’s pores.
So much of comic book sexuality is premised on ethereality: the idealized beauty of impossible bodies, untouchably glamorous, only capturable in the unfussy brushstrokes of experts. Vila’s characters are earthy. They have been through some shit and found fucking to be the best respite from life’s indignities. We are told that Ludovica is only 30, but one look would have you put her age a good deal older; it’s clear the way she’s lived has taken its toll on her body, face, skin. Her older ex, Alberto, has glasses falling unevenly across his face, giving him the gobsmacked expression of someone who cannot take care of himself. That this is the schemer on whom Ludovica is pinning her hopes betrays so much about what has gone wrong in her life, and why it will likely continue to do so unabated.
Marco has wide eyes and pursed lips that suggest perpetual nervousness, like he might begin crying at any minute. It is clear this vulnerable quality is what draws Stella to him; that for all she flaunts her flirtatiousness, she sees him as needing protection. This doesn’t prevent him from being manipulative, lying and using his patheticness to get what he wants from her. Vila's skill in drawing is such that he is able to convey what the characters see in each other, while leaving enough intelligence behind the eyes to remind us that these are not bovines. We see them looking: they watch each other, not just porn. They are capable of duplicity, each in their distinct way.
This is Miguel Vila’s first book in English, and it is so assured in its storytelling, and confident in the particulars it presents, that one may be uncertain whether he is an especially skilled writer, or simply one of the legions of European comics artists—Milo Manara and Guido Crepax being two high-profile examples—animated by their sexual preferences, whose work makes a strong first impression for the strength of its drawing and forthright approach but decreases in impressiveness once the shallowness of their interests registers upon discovering how much of their bibliography is given over to the same themes. It is the richness of his characters here that confirms Vila is not just an artist who knows what he’s doing, but one who can do even more than what he’s already accomplished. There are two untranslated books which with Milky Way forms a trilogy, all set in the same section of modern Italy. My hope is this book does well enough we see at least one more. I’ll sidestep the pornography analogy and instead apply the same language to a glass of milk: after drinking it down, I’m perfectly satisfied, but I know my metabolism well enough to know I’ll want another before too long.
