Frontline Heroines: Milo Manara

Milo Manara. “Coraggio”(Courage). 2020.
 https://www.instagram.com/p/B-sF8ALB5qJ/

Stefano Pitrelli  reports in the Washington Post (4/9/20)  that during the national lockdown, Italian comic book illustrator Maurilo (Milo) Manara has created a series of images honoring women medical and essential service workers on the frontline of the struggle against Covid-19.  The online article contains a slideshow showing an exhausted, gowned young woman physician, leaning against a wall, sinking to the ground, and then, fist clenched, standing up with new resolve, donning a mask, and racing to do battle with the pathogen. The final image of the sequence shows her face to face to with an enormous virus.  The image does seem to be gendered in a striking fashion, the novel coronavirus, one senses, is a vile, aggressively male supervillain kin to the grotesquely obese, liscentious Jabba the Hutt, its engorged spikes, one visible between the heroine's legs, disturbingly phallic.  The vast virus  faces its empowered  lone adversary, a young woman cast as St. George preparing to battle the Dragon. Evidently, the maiden she is saving is herself, or perhaps all humanity.  The artist has posted the slideshow sequence on Instagram  and titled it "Coraggio," (Courage), with the comment, translated from Italian by CBR.com: "Thanks to all the staff of all the hospitals in Italy and the world who are struggling on the front lines." (cbr.com)

Looking at these images, and thinking of the artist confined to his home in the devastated Veneto region of northern Italy, one wonders if this beautiful young woman, shown out in the world in a great range of roles (doctor, policewoman,  sanitation worker, grocery clerk) is a kind of avatar for the now imprisoned artist, going all the places that he, and most Italians, are forbidden to travel. 

It is noteworthy that the artist speaks of these images as a "debt" being paid to the women he has illustrated over the years; perhaps he is referencing his many eroticized, objectified images, showing beautiful young woman as objects of male desire, for which  he has at times been criticized over the years. Is this new series a kind of penance? Having said that, I remain concerned that Everywoman here is homogeneously figured as a svelte, youthful supermodel: perhaps in the future the artist will choose to honor Italian women essential workers, in all the marvelous variety of ages, body types, and looks of actual womankind. 

To my mind, the most striking image of the series is the virus presented as the Pied Piper of Hamlin dancing a tune to lure teenagers out of their homes into dangerous pursuits outdoors, where they risk being infected and transmitting the virus to others. Here, the young woman figure is in the shadows, confined to a basement apartment looking longingly through a window up at the merry procession. The Pied Piper is dressed as an alluring medieval harlequin, surrounded by brightly colored viruses floating in the air, tempting youth to their doom.  The artist may be alluding to the Late Medieval performance and artistic genre of the Danse Macabre or Dance of Death, in which Death leads rich and poor, dancing, to the graveyard.  Once again, it would appear. iconography echoing European encounters with prior plagues is called up, as humanity grapples with an epidemic of almost unfathomable proportions.