Review by Frank Plowright
The cover illustration suggests war stories may be the theme, but there’s a science-fiction element along the way, which isn’t the case. However, now the volume subtitles have moved beyond geographical designations, the theme is vague. The stories here may occur in times of war, but Sergio Toppi’s focus is on people, not battles. Just as some of these stories might have fitted those locations, so earlier stories might have been included here.
If there’s one thing these collections of Toppi’s work have displayed it’s a continually restless mind. The suspicion is of Toppi deciding what he wants to draw and building a story around it, but as his methods are surely time consuming, his solo career was one of submitting short stories to anthologies. It certainly allows a freedom for his unconventionally brilliant art constructed around large illustrations, but considering his career as a whole there’s a disappointment at so few longer narratives. However, at 48 pages ‘Hidden Face’ is the longest story in this series other than those starring the Collector in Volume Eight.
It’s titled after a mysterious white man gone rogue in New Guinea at the end of the 19th century, helping the locals attack German plantation owners. He wears a large tribal mask concealing his face. The German command employ an expert tracker and another soldier of his choosing to put an end to Hidden Face. It’s very much about the journey, Toppi relishing the scenery and illustrating the tribesmen encountered along the way, drawn with plain admiration for their adornments. Toppi leads readers to suspect the tracker is also Hidden Face, but is this true? Having wished for a longer story, the content is a little too slim for the length, but the art astounds and the mystery’s solution is arrived at neatly.
The opener occurs in 1742 with a soldier expressing admiration for a general. It’s never certain which of them the name Köllwitz in the title refers to. We then move forward two centuries to the remains of desert warfare during World War II and onward to Vietnam thirty years later. Both tales feature someone ignorant of what’s been unleashed.
‘Nahim’ dates from 1993, but could have been produced in the past couple of years as it deals with a woman and her son displaced by warfare, in this case in what was Yugoslavia. Toppi draws the ruins with the care he takes over beautiful artefacts in other tales, and it differs from those in being told conventionally with panels rather than by his usual methods, the point for once taking priority over the illustrations. It’s based on the snipers surrounding Sarajevo, and a grim surprise awaits.
As with all volumes, this is a thoughtfully designed, attractive hardcover book with rounded corners, but also the slimmest in the series to date, although that is reflected in the cover price. Men of the World is next.
