EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 25 © 2019 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

9 once reminiscent of Moebius, but also adding his own personal touch, and, although it wasn’t an erotic series, it featured his absolutely sensual girls. Although Manara began using photo references for his drawings, there are panels within the comic that are filled with hundreds of characters fighting each other. There was also experimenting with the presention of the panels within the page, reminiscent of what the Spanish artists (such as Maroto) were doing at the time. Dating from 1976 (later published in Heavy Metal in the US in the early ’80s) this series grabbed the attention of French publishers Larousse who were looking for cartoonists to adapt the history of France in comic book form. Manara, among an array of other better-known artists from Italy, Spain, and France, participated on this project. influence many artists around Europe. Through a series of stippling and short lines on the figures and objects he drew, Moebius gave them an almost three-dimensional quality, bringing tomind nineteenth century engravings as well. This particular style of drawing is known as the ‘Moebius style’, and Manara took it to heart. He first experimented with it in a series of short stories (even doing a science-fiction one called ‘Fon’ that looked a lot like what Moebius did at the time) and culminated in a longer book-length story by Silverio Pisu called ‘The Ape’, based on the Chinese fantasy character of the ape Sun Wu-Kung. Pisu’s adaption was a more modern one, filtered through the Mao culture of the post-1968 years. It was, however, Manara’s drawings that brought this series to the forefront, in a style at