Three women, three names of saints, three tragic destinies. Nine Antico talks about desire, feminism and patriarchy in an ambitious and impressive work, Madonnas and Whores, where she weaves together three independent stories but with strong ties. The album confirms Antico as one of the new and most interesting voices in French-speaking comics and is published in our country by Garbuix Books, with translation by Regina López Muñoz.
Taking as a starting point some personal memories of her trips to Italy, where her father was born, the French Nine Antico mixes personal experiences, readings, historical figures and lives of saints to build a rich story with different layers of meaning. Among her memories, one that caught her attention powerfully: the presence of religious images in the streets of Southern Italy. Among the readings, a novel by Curzio Malaparte, The Skin (1949), or the texts of the British poet and actress Mina Loy, author of the Feminist Manifesto (1914).
Madonnas and Whores tells the life of Agata, Lucía and Rosalía, three women in struggle, three combative women who must keep their desires repressed. Agata is a young teenager exiled in a medical institute, her father has sent her there to keep her away from the scandal unleashed after the murder of her mother at the hands of her lover. Lucia had her head shaved and was excluded from social life at the end of World War II after being caught with a German soldier. Rosalía was disowned by her people after having denounced the mafia clans in her town.
In these pages there is story and mythology, but also moments that approach journalistic reportage and non-fiction. Mafia, omertá, terrorism, feminicide, prostitution as a way to survive... As always in Antico, its feminism is present in a natural and spontaneous way, not as a militant or vindictive gesture.
Nine Antico questions female desire under the gaze of the other, a gaze full of guilt and social disapproval in Italy in the 20th century. A masculine, religious, cultural gaze, always censorious and full of violence. A violence associated with the Catholic faith and carnal desire; a limited desire within a repressed body, a severed desire (in some cases, literally).
The author says that her way of making a comic is “a kind of staging, a storyboard.” It is not strange that she is like that because she studied film and as a comic book author she is self-taught. But in this album she proposes a more advanced graphic narrative than in other titles, more mature. The elevator scene or the descent into the catacombs show that Antico masters not only the art of chaining vignettes but also controls and takes advantage of the page as a fundamental narrative and plastic space in the comic.
Antico also plays cleverly with color, especially red, which very occasionally splashes across this essentially black-white album. A harsh black and white, sometimes line, sometimes stain; reinforced by a very notable expressive use of typography (we must value the work of Gabriel Regueiro in the adaptation to Spanish). The drawing of Madonnas and Whores constantly oscillates between the realism of some sets, the stylization of the characters and the distortion of some expressions.
