Outlaws, Native Americans, katanas, bandits, the beautiful but deadly natural landscape and animal inhabitants of ‘murica, and the filthy lucre, gold, gold, goooooold! that drives the conflict behind most of the stories here.
North America collects Sergio Toppi’s comics set on this continent from the late ‘70s to 2007. Out of the three books from this series I’ve read (the other two being The Enchanted World and Japan), it’s my least favourite, mostly because the stories are either forgettable/unremarkable, and the art is quite similar from one story to the next, making them even harder to remember as they all tend to blur together.
The first story, The Admiral at Rest, was ok - it’s about an old man living on the frontier who’s taken hostage by a bandit; except the bandit doesn’t know who the old man used to be or what he’s capable of.
Another story I thought was ok was Katana, which is the only colour strip in the book and is about a miner with an iron hand who tries to cross a mountain pass without paying the toll to the Japanese man with the katana. Once in a Lifetime is also not bad - a cops’n’robbers chase story across the mountains.
A lot of the stories though don’t have a coherent narrative, nor do they have anything particularly interesting happening in them, so they just passed me by without leaving any impression behind. As Long As You Live seemed to only be about a Native American realising the flaws of Western technology and learning to embrace their traditions; Little Big Horn 1875 was an abstract telling of the famous battle, or at least the lead up to it; The Heir was a magical realist piece about the son of the Voodoo God Baron Samedi, or something; Blues was about a sax player, a junk dealer with a shady past, and the guy hunting him down; Naugatuck 1757 - no idea what that one was about!
Toppi’s art remains the most impressive thing in these collections. They’re really detailed and expressive, and, thanks to the obvious research he put into drawing accurate clothes and infrastructure of the time, effortlessly transports you to the historical past. Mostly because a lot of the stories centre around the Gold Rush, they’re set in that specific time period in the 19th century and geographic location, the West Coast, so the pages tend to feature a lot of the same landscapes and character designs, which can be a bit tedious to see one after the other. Even so, seeing the work of a master artist like Toppi is still quite something.
While The Collected Toppi, Volume 2: North America has Toppi’s signature amazing art, his other books, like The Enchanted World and Japan, also feature more entertaining stories, so, if you’re interested in this creator, I’d recommend those over this one instead.
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