Future Perfect, the tenth volume in Magnetic Press' collected works of Sergio Toppi,1 sets itself apart before you've even opened it: its cover is the first one in the series that doesn't sport a solid white background, instead dominated by a deep blue sky; its resolution is high enough to see the texture of the drafting paper warp under the inconsistent sink of watercolor. An apt divergence, given its shift in priorities: as the title suggests, this is the first English-language collection of Toppi works to take place in the future, rather than the past.
As we are reminded within the book itself, in an introduction by 10-years-deceased Canadian playwright and politician Jean-Louis Roux, science fiction and its related aesthetics were not exactly the main thing Toppi was interested in; Future Perfect is therefore something of a humanizing moment for the Italian master. Truth be told, I'm always somewhat intimidated by Toppi. In both writing and art, Charles Schulz's axiom served as Toppi's categorial imperative: here was a man who drew the same thing day after day and never repeated himself, not really. His genre work had that mercurial yet immediately identifiable elegance that allowed him to ascend from simple 'crap' (in the Kim Thompson sense of the word) to authentic artfulness. At his best, he was inscrutable, and even on off-days he was too slippery to pin down; more often than not, when he did falter, he did so in ways so compelling that even his failures could not be framed as rules broken.
The drawing here is, of course, phenomenal, albeit in almost exactly the way a Toppi reader has come to expect. The fact is, the man did not appear to change much in the way of drawing. The glass-like shimmer of his laborious hatching, the illustrative compositions that eschew kinesis in favor of montage, the perspectives that feel at once flat and infinite in depth - Toppi's work is so uniform in visual character that a third collection carries few surprises of that quality, the tenth even less so. But there are glimmers in Future Perfect of a slightly different Toppi. Two consecutive panels in "Sneak Preview" (1994), for instance, depict a man running energetically, and the texture is one of swift strokes of the hand, not glassy but inky; this character, eschewing Toppi's usual heroic-statuesque posing, runs in a manner far more reminiscent of Manuele Fior or Jordi Lafebre, all spindly limbs and sharp-triangle nose. The idea of 'the future' generally serves as an interesting vessel for Toppi's textural sensibilities: the blinding lights of mega-cities and spaceships specifically warrant extra love and care from the artist, for whom illumination is of the utmost importance. But these brief divergences only reinforce your idea of what Toppi is: a craftsman of amber, an artist of the immaculately preserved. And yet, perfectly predictable though it may be, the quality of it is almost impossibly high, never appearing machine-made yet nonetheless appearing completely unimpeachable; every line is exactly where it needs to be. Sometimes a train that runs on time, every time, is simply admirable.
From a curatorial standpoint, one may note a slight misstep in Future Perfect: the book purports to present "a series of stories speculating on the future," yet one story doesn't belong in that prompt. "An Idea that is Hard To Get Used to" (1983), the third in the collection, does show a fantastical scenario where a man is forced to battle Godzilla-like monsters, but its end twist is that the protagonist is in Hell, condemned to relive the same thing over and over again; a perfectly enjoyable story in its own right, it's an inclusion that sticks out. The collection breaks its own rules before it's even managed to get comfortable within them - and Toppi was all about getting comfortable within his own rules.
"Baltazzi the Valiant" (1993), the other monster-themed story in the book, does employ sci-fi conditions - it focuses on an office drone who uses his lunch breaks to put on mechanical armor and play Don Quixote in an attempt to make the oppressive capitalist mundanity surrounding him more bearable. Its twist is cute—he comes upon a real monster threatening to kill a woman, only to learn that they are, in fact, weary lovers trying to spice up their sex life—but it's the final punchline that makes it a true Toppi story. To make up for his disappointment, Baltazzi buys himself a house in a remote desert area, where he can slay as many dragons as he wants - except the 'dragons' are just small, helpless lizards. He was never a hero; he just wanted to feel as powerful as one.
"Love is Jealousy" (1992) builds itself up as one of the strongest pieces in the book; its depictions of industrial machinery, painstakingly articulated and heavily inked, are complemented by a distinctly bitter tone more befitting of world-weary gekiga of Tsuge or Tatsumi than the Italian at hand. It is a story about a miserable maintenance man repairing heavy machinery, narrated by the machines that have fallen in love with him. Their aching desire, of course, is unreciprocated, as all the man can think of is his own longing: for flesh, not for pistons. Toppi's anthropomorphized machinery speak in flowery, fawning theatrics, like a kid's idea of tragic love, and it works in getting the point across - this is not a love that makes any sort of sense, not least because the repairman, haggard as Harry Dean Stanton, doesn't speak this language. The machines may be tangible, but the man is all too earthly.
Yet the end of the story has a note of such discordant literalism that I couldn't help but laugh out loud, which I don't suspect was Toppi's goal. The machinery, noticing that the repairman hasn't come around to do his job in a couple of days, find out the reason: their paramour has gotten himself laid. Heartbroken, the machines don't know what to do, but they don't want to dirty themselves with his blood, so they find a solution in a truly goofy-looking little robot with a knife, immediately offsetting all delusions of mechanical grandeur we've seen up to that point. The internet adage rings true - sometimes you just need a fucked up little freak to do the job. I am again reminded of Tatsumi, one of his own stabs at futuristic sci-fi, "The Woman's Palace" (collected in English in Landmark Books' bizarre and overlooked 2013 Tatsumi collection Midnight Fishermen) - another story about the connection between man and machine, told by a cartoonist who thinks too much about the inner conflicts of the former to really know what to do with the latter.
In “Frontier Post” (1990), probably the best story in Future Perfect (and certainly the most unsubtle, though Toppi wears it well),2 two guards on an unnamed border distract themselves by watching TV on the job. They settle for a show called "Margrave of Brabant" about a medieval European despot. As the show describes how those who sought to escape their oppressor were mostly killed on their journeys, the two guards dismiss it as boring drivel; and them, an asylum seeker arrives at the futuristic border wall, begging for safety, only to be sent away because the stamps on his forms have expired. It's a brutal punchline that would not feel out of place in Chantal Montellier's Social Fiction: bureaucracy as state violence made palatable; aesthetic as anesthetic. It's also a manifestation of Toppi's key concern, which is historical significance. Knowledge of the past is power in the most straightforward sense, and its absence an even greater weakness - if it is offered to you, you have the obligation to take it.
It's worth examining, in this context, the core of Toppi's historical romanticism. In previous Magnetic Press volumes we've seen him orating folktales from all over the world (Africa, Japan, the Americas pre-1492), and even where the stories are original they deal with the past in its most idealized sense. Everything under Toppi's hand becomes folkloric, Platonic, extra-temporal. Yet he portrays these cultures with a veneration unusual in European comics tradition (it only takes one look at what his colleagues to the west were saying in Tintin or Spirou for a reader to get dizzy); Toppi was guilty of some degree of exoticism, to be sure, but he had a genuine respect for foreign cultures on their own terms, without the sheen of the generalized other; he studied them ardently and depicted them with a vigorous specificity, regardless of locale. The romantic prism that Whitman reserved for America, Toppi extended to the entire globe, indiscriminately: culture, all human culture, was glorious to him because it was human, and because it was culture.
This becomes its own problem, as in lieu of dehumanizing his subjects he often ends up extrahumanizing them: so enamored is this artist with the idea of folklore (in the most etymological sense, as the infrastructure to a collective identity) that, no matter the human subject, they tend to exist as ciphers - signifiers of the otherworldly nature of the world. Yet it cannot be said that our man was a peddler of mere starry-eyed naïvetés; his series The Collector offered an inversion of the adventurer-hero by presenting its protagonist as a truly vile bastard, whose epitome of historical appreciation was to 'collect' - i.e., to isolate history from its context and sequester it into guarded privacy. Culture, Toppi knew, is more than just the ideal; it has its roots in flesh and blood, and it only when it lives in its context does it truly live.
But culture is always a construct of curation in retrospect, and here we are dealing with the future, which leaves Toppi in a tricky predicament, one that he confronts head-on in “A Serious Shortcoming” (1990). Here we have a corporate installation dealing in the extraction of wurtzite from an ancient meteorite. This outfit, as is often the case in Future Perfect, is staffed by one lone employee; and he gets bored, as is often the case in Future Perfect, very easily. His 'entertainment' comes from an old man among the territory's natives—the geography is unnamed, 'native' flattened almost to the point of a displaced aesthetic—who tells our sneering technician stories of myth and folklore. But this time around the story is different: it's the story of those who came before the technician and his employer, those greedy pillagers who thought they could supersede the masters of the land. Their hubris, of course, is ever their undoing. We can almost hear the unlettered gulp of our protagonist as the lights go out around him; it is not that the 'savage' here is 'noble' so much as the oppressor was foolish enough to ever think of him as a savage at all. These men are on equal footing, and if one is in fact better it just goes to show the other's myopia.3
The two stories bookending Future Perfect come at the same scenario from divergent perspectives. "Rio dei Mendicoli, in the Year of Our Lord 10,982" (1982) and "Science Fiction"4 both focus on the last vestiges of human society. In the former, the last occupant of a neighborhood of rich Italian families speaks of his longing for society, but only for the "right" society - the rich and supposedly cultured, with the final 'twist' being that he is held captive in the souvenir bottles of a Brainiac-esque alien collector. In the latter, two isolated humans permanently strung out on a potent hallucinogenic submerge themselves in power fantasies to distract themselves from the desolation of real life.
These are stories about people reliving their ever-decaying, ever-fabricated memories of the past; more than they are running away from active external threats, they are running away from the vacancy of their true reality. This is the distillation of Sergio Toppi's future: where the past is enshrined in narrative, at once constructed and consecrated, the future offers no such luxury. With its tendency to hurtle at one with no warning, the future exists at best as a discomfort and at worst as a violent striking of the record. Hardly a novel point, but it carries a certain wistfulness here: Toppi, an artist who found inspiration in every nook and cranny of what preceded him, looked ahead and saw nothing. He saw narratives, sure - the book I'm holding in my hand as I write this is proof that he had ideas, but these were all narratives of absence. There are no pivotal events in Toppi's future, no news of note: just a world revolving around its former self in ever-tightening circles. Even when Toppi was looking forward, it was into a mirror, with himself looking back; even when he recognized the futility of retrospection, as is the case in both "Rio dei Mendicoli" and "Science Fiction," he still could not resist this instinct. The past is a wound, and it does feel good to pick at.
"Science fiction, Toppi-style," writes Roux in his introduction, "delivers a simple message: a leopard doesn't change its spots! Or, to put it another way: human beings cannot hope to be anything other than what they are." Far be it from me to say whether humankind can in fact change on any fundamental level, or even whether Toppi the man would agree. But Toppi the artist might dispute this, and do you one better: if man cannot move forward, or even imagine a way forward, then Sergio Toppi is little more than a man.
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- Corresponding with identical French-language editions published by Editions Mosquito.
- It's also the most poorly reproduced of the pieces; the other stories in this collection are printed at a substantially crisper resolution, whereas here the lines are oddly dull and washed-out.
- It's thus unsurprising that Toppi's sci-fi largely avoids discussion of aliens: his future dystopias are distinctly human products. Where aliens do appear in Future Perfect they are a vague, foreboding presence, only gestured toward but never depicted or affirmed outright. Otherwise, the greatest threat to humans is the same as it ever was: themselves.
- Notably, the editors of this collection have left "Science Fiction" as the sole story with no date of publication, no venue, and no Italian title; it's unclear to me when and where it was first published.
