I Really Should Read This 25: The Collected Toppi: North America, by Toppi

The Collected Toppi: North America, by Toppi

1977-2007, collected in 2020

This is my first time writing about Toppi, it won't be my last.

Magnetic Collection love their rounded corners

Over and over again, algorithms kept recommending Toppi to me based on what I do online, and about the 20th time, I took the machine's advice and checked it out, and it turns out it was what I wanted to read. I wonder if I had seen this some of this stuff 30 years ago in Heavy Metal or somewhere, but if I had, I was too young to really appreciate it. 

The stories in this volume range from 1976 to 2007, but most fall in the 70s and 80s

So, right up front, regardless of the quality of the writing, people are going to buy this for the art. Toppi draws the hell out of everything.

A shaman 

Every panel of every page is finely detailed and designed. I have no doubt that he got to a point in his art that he could produce this way without a lot of conscious planning: the textures, patches, spirals and strokes that make up his page have an organic quality like forms in nature have. I think that's the strength of it, his pages reflect the design of nature itself, like shapes in physics and biology. It's gorgeous to look at.

Not a lot of artists could make the grain of a wooden door look so compelling.

And there's more to it than just the images. He designs every page and panel to work with each other. Some combinations work better than others, but the guy has a rhythm of his own.

The inversion of positive and negative space between panels one and two is simple but striking, and lets the figures in the second jump out

Repeatedly as I read, I had to pause and take in how he was telling the story as much as I took in the stories themselves.

The bottom panels ascend in height as the characters ascend a slope

One other thing that stands out about his pages is that the panels are repeatedly broken, usually just a little, but it makes pages work as a unit rather than a collection of panels. Just a slight overlap here and there, but it prevents the panels from being rearranged. He's built a form-fitting construction of images.

The fourth panel commands the page by being the biggest, but it also does so by having the house slightly overlap into the first and third panel

This series, The Collected Toppi, is not typical of artist retrospectives. Often, books are done sequentially, with periods of an artist's work presented together. This series is by theme, with this book being North American stories. Other books feature Asia, Japan (technically Asia, but I get it, Japan gets more romanticized than the rest of the continent), South America, Africa, and a general fantasy theme one. Even within the book, the stories are not arranged sequentially. It frustrates the OCD part of me, but across 30 years Toppi's style was mostly consistent, so it isn't jarring to me as a reader. 

For the most part, North America means 19th century stories featuring white settlers and First Nations indigenous, with two stories in the volume about magical negroes, for lack of a better term. In some of the indigenous stories, the people have "magic", not in all. This is the writing of a man born in Italy in 1932, writing about the world, and so he worked in a lot of tropes verging on stereotypes. I'm fully aware of the contemporary discussion of topics in English Western culture, but I've also lived in Asia for 20 years and am aware that people in many countries enjoy their romanticized images of far away lands. The writing is not malicious in any way that I could notice, and generally had sympathy for the horror show that is the settlement of North America.

An Italian view of America's natives

That said, if today the Disney Corporation were to make a movie on the 19th century indigenous person's experiences, they're unlikely to consult the writing of a post-war Italian writer at any part of the process. 

I'm not going to say I'm blown away by the stories in here. These are largely old fashioned stories. These reminded me of Farley Mowat stories I might have read as a kid. In elementary school in Canada, here and there we would read tales of pioneers and explorers in Upper Canada. So they aren't super fresh to me now, but it's not a genre of story I see much in comics or film, so on that level, it's a change of pace.

A story with a samurai immigrant is colored with something like watercolors

What I like in the stories here is that there isn't a set morality or pattern of story. This isn't Uncle Scrooge where at the end of every story will have Uncle Scrooge rich and Donald Duck poor. A story where a man is warned to leave in peace could (and does) go a number of ways. He leaves and reflects on his wise decision. Or he doesn't leave and pays the price. Or he doesn't leave, and he deflates a myth and lives a long life. Toppi wasn't making stories in a clear tradition, and if there is any moral to the stories, it's that every story is different and one size doesn't fit all.

Ultimately though, if Toppi weren't drawing these stories, they'd be of limited appeal. Without his line work, they'd lose so much of their gravitas. 

There are four of these Toppi collections published, with two more on the way. I'm getting all of them. Maybe they'll start to feel repetitive after a few, but with the two I've read, I think that the six will be a very good amount of his stories and I may be interested in getting more.