Review by Frank Plowright

There have been examples of sly humour in earlier collections of Sergio Toppi’s work, yet it’s hardly commonplace, and in what’s been seen over nine previous volumes Toppi is a serious creator prone to contemplation about human behaviour and spiritual matters. However, a sense of humour is far more overt in this selection of stories set within science-fiction parameters. What does it say about Toppi that he sees SF as a vehicle for laughs alongside his astonishing visual spectacle?

In other ways we’re in familiar territory. It often seems Toppi first decides what he wants to draw, then constructs his plot around the visual priorities. That’s certainly the case for an opening story featuring a middle-aged man as the sole remaining human in the year 10,982. He tours objects and architecture, all beautifully rendered in Toppi’s complex style, before a clever sting in the tail ending.

As ever, the art is magnificent, barely changing over nine stories spanning 1982 to 1994, pictures constructed from random shapes and lines that shouldn’t work, but do. The sample page features an insanely detailed and disturbing form of organic machine feeding hallucinatory drugs into two willing recipients. The imaginative construction has the feel of spontaneity, materialising on the page rather than planned, and before that page we’ve seen a sea plane with an intensely detailed engine flying over distinctive rock formations before firing on ape men followed by a giant armadillo heading for a naked woman. As bonkers as that is, it’s also one of the few strips with a point to make beyond a joke.

Other amazing illustrations include regular favourites such as rock formations and eccentric people, but Toppi’s SF features dinosaurs or giant lizards. There’s a unicorn, and an ancient helmet, with a bizarre love story set amid page after page of giant industrial machinery being a standout.

Playwright Jean-Louis Roux provides an introduction highlighting Toppi’s sense of mischief and how so many of his stories deal with the arrogance of the conqueror brought to heel by someone they either dismiss or patronise. That theme continues here, most prominently when a representative from a technologically advanced race patronisingly solicits myths from an elderly native of a subjugated planet.

Fans of hardcore SF might not agree with the slim, but arbitrary genre designation, but everyone should appreciate the prodigious talent and imagination.