The Adventures of Mia by Enrico Casarosa
Enrico Casarosa is a storyboard artist living in San Francisco, working in animation by day, publishing artbooks and comics by night. Forever stuck between the gravitational pulls of Italy his home country and Japan, a cultural passion.
He has been in the animation industry for more than ten years, drawing storyboards that fit into large animated feature films. Currently he is a story artist at Pixar Animation Studios.
Enrico continues his quest to create more hours in the day by drawing alternate realities. Sooner or later his experiments will break through and we’ll all have to buy new watches. Meantime he just published an art book “3 trees make a forest” with partners in crime Ronnie del Carmen and Tadahiro Uesugi.
Other times he pursues his muse by traveling with his watercolors and sketchbooks. Enrico is the founder of SketchCrawl a world wide drawing marathon event that gathers artists from all around the globe.
The Adventures of Mia
Is 32 pages, black and white interiors standard comicbook size. Randy Lander from the 4th Rail reviewed the comic book saying, “the issue features one story rather than three and the artwork is just as beautiful if not moreso than the first issue. Casarosa’s tale conveys the joy of flight and youth but also has an edge in terms of examining World War II-era Italy and introduces a likable heroic resistance fighter into the life of his young protagonist. The result is a perfect adventure comic, with an exotic setting, gorgeous artwork and very likable characters.
An Artist First and Writer Second
It’s clear from Mia that Casarosa is an artist first and writer second because while his writing is solid, his artwork is gorgeous, and he often takes advantage of the luxury of page upon page of wordless sequences showing off airplanes in flight.
The opening sequence, a three page silent sequence, really gives a sense of Mia’s flight skills and of the joy that she takes in putting a plane through its paces.
It’s also worth noting that, while taking three pages for this could seem a little indulgent, Casarosa tells us a lot about the character and her setting in these wordless pages, and it certainly never feels like he’s wasting space. Indeed, Casarosa is a master of visual storytelling, and of setting the tone with visuals alone.
The Sequence of the Saboteur
Stealing the experimental plane (sort of) from the Italian airbase portrays that character as wily and professional, but also with a sort of mischievous trickster sense of humor, and the sequence called to mind the Pink Panther films as much as it did the cool pulp adventure that clearly inspired Adventures of Mia as a whole.
The Adventures of Mia deposits the reader into another world, not just the world of a young girl or one that is invested with the importance of flight, but in a foreign country that is in the grip of a corrupt government.
The notion of doing the right thing even though it goes against the dictates of your Government is one that rings particularly true in this day in age, and while we’ve seen any number of World War II stories set against the backdrop of Germany or Japan, we’ve seen relatively little exploration of the Italian experience in World War II.
Casarosa offers up a setting that is familiar enough to draw the reader in, but different and new enough to keep them engaged. The bottom line is that the Adventures of Mia is a beautifully illustrated and imaginative look at heroism from unusual sources, flavored with a love of old flying machines.”
