The Collected Toppi Vol. 11: War Stories

Let us look, briefly, at the key characteristics of Sergio Toppi as a cartoonist: characters often stretch past the bounds of their panels, in compositions that resemble stained-glass windows; objects often do the same, rendered as negative space; surfaces are rendered with fiddly, clashing textures; angles flit between long shots and extreme close-ups; speech balloons bulb with text, showing little care for naturalist rhythms of speech, rarely pausing or breaking into two balloons what can be contained in one. All of which is to say, Sergio Toppi’s sense of drama is one that is fundamentally arranged, reveling in artistic liberty. His is a world of opera, not kitchen-sink theater.

Consider, then, the 1977 short “Köllwitz 1742,” which opens the latest volume in Magnetic Press’ library of Toppi translations. A soldier serving under an ostensibly-undefeated general in the First Silesian War finds a large metal key around the neck of his dead brother-in-arms. Soon afterwards, for the first time, the general’s battalion loses in battle, due to evident lack of coordination; our protagonist survives only because he dishonorably flees the battlefield. When a high-ranking officer finds him asleep by a tree, the officer notices the key and lures him into surrendering it — then kills the soldier. Soon we learn the true significance of the key: the glorious general is nought more than a human-sized wind-up toy, a secret kept by his inner circle; it is he who gives the orders, but without his wind-up mechanism he is worthless.

“Köllwitz 1742” operates on a charming absurdity: the general is, in truth, a complete fiction, but he is a lie agreed upon, made powerful (sigilized, if you are so inclined) by hierarchical deference. This opening short is the closest thing to a successful story in the collection, simply due to its regard of the past. While three of the collection’s five stories take place, chronologically, within Toppi’s lifetime (a fourth, “Hidden Face,” is set 37 years before he was born — still within living memory to the cartoonist himself), the distance of over two centuries allows Toppi to sink into his preferred mode: the past as a metaphorical, fabulist realm. It is this approach that best suits his artistic sensibilities: to truly succeed, he needs a world that is halfway into myth.

By contrast, see “Nahim” (1993), about a young Muslim boy and his grandmother trying to flee the Bosnian War by crossing the border to Montenegro. The first words uttered in the story, by the grandmother: “Look at our fields … once, they produced enough for all of us to live on, but now, they’re just a graveyard for dead machines … madness has befallen us! One against another, and everyone against everyone else.” Immediately, Toppi succumbs to melodrama, telling his readers how to feel before they’ve had a chance to get their bearings.

In “Nahim” we see a furthering of the concern that underlies “Köllwitz 1742.” “Listen, Grandma… we’re fighting for you on empty stomachs, and you would deny us of a little crust of bread?” says the soldier who turns Nahim and his grandmother away on their way to the border — confiscating her bread and sending the two off into the unknown. Even more than the death and displacement and destruction, the cardinal sin of war in Toppi’s eyes is its toppling of the illusion ofa  benevolent hierarchy that exists during times of peace; the notion that war is waged in the interest of civilian safety is, to the cartoonist, an outright lie.

This is most notably embodied by Vlado, the Christian soldier that Nahim looks up to and thinks of as his friend. Vlado is the perfect "older brother" figure — he’s big and strong, he plays the accordion, he even taught Nahim how to fish. When Nahim and his grandmother finally find refuge in a razed village, they are told by the locals (whose emaciated, starving visages obviously pose no danger to anyone, let alone to any army) that a nearby sniper has posted himself on a nearby hill, and will shoot at any civilian who tries to pull water from the village’s sole fountain. When Nahim is sent to get water from the other nearby fountain, on the other side of the hill, he eventually gets lost and climbs the hill to reorient himself. It is there that he learns the true identity of the sniper — his dear friend Vlado.

I can’t help but compare these stories to Will Eisner or Joe Kubert — two other cartoonists who, in tackling similarly heady, real-world themes in an attempt to transcend their pulp roots, likewise revealed their own similarly-glaring weaknesses. To be sure, there are moments of beauty, especially on the visual end — the page in which Nahim scales uphill is an elegant McCay-esque use of spatiality, the boy vertically "rising" along the tall panels — but it is overall offset by the author’s frustrated attempts to force the ongoing tragedies of the real world (note the publication date — this was written and published fairly soon after the Bosnian War broke out) into the neat prism of fable and moral, reducing real lives and struggles into mere archetypes.

Of course, the issue here is one not only of time but of place as well. Much like the previous volume in the series, Future Perfect, in War Stories too there is an undercurrent of profound fear — the fear of a world that cannot be trusted, of a higher political power not as benevolent as one was raised to believe. It is who the cartoonist projects this fear onto, however, that raises questions. Toppi, we must remember, is nothing if not a tried-and-true romantic, forever attempting to keep the "modern world" — for a fairly Eurocentric value of the phrase, even when he speaks in condemnation of Europe — at bay. Only when they are applied to places that are sufficiently othered, sufficiently exotic, does he find the ability to articulate his worries. Egypt, Vietnam, Bosnia, and New Guinea are enclaves of the past contained within the present, not at all the same as classical Europe.

In this regard, “The Thing that Walks by My Side” (1980) is perhaps the most telling. Set in a Vietnamese village during the Vietnam War, the story is centered around a young boy whose concerns are distinctly earthly: herding the buffalo, watching the geese. The arrival of American soldiers (to whom the boy, only tenuously aware of the war and the world outside the village, refers simply as the men, no nationality or affiliation) disrupts this routine: they gather everyone in the village square and take a sole prisoner, not even allowing the uncomprehending young boy to give him water. They finally leave, but when the boy goes out to the field the next day to search for a runaway buffalo he finds one of the soldiers lying mortally wounded. The boy tries to give the soldier water, remarking on the fact that that same soldier wouldn’t allow him to give the prisoner water the previous day, and makes a single request: that the soldiers “be kind” and never come back; “You frighten people, the animals run off, and no one works in the fields anymore.” It’s of no use, of course — the soldier is already dead.

For the concluding page, Toppi the artist delivers a stunning drawing of the trees in the Vietnamese field, with all their polytextural splendor; but Toppi the writer has no interest in rendering his people with the same amount of detail. In making the protagonist a rural-Vietnamese child, Toppi in truth equates his being a child with his otherness: watch, he tells his readers, as this boy’s purity is encroached upon twice over. It is simultaneously hand-wringing (oh, the evil we do), valorizing (oh, the evil we do to those unsullied others), and patronizing (oh, the evil we do to those pure others who, in knowing better than us, know nothing at all).

The fact that Nahim and the protagonist of “The Thing that Walks by My Side” are literal children is in itself of significance. A child is a figure of immediate sympathy; it is much easier for Toppi to leave them on this note of trauma, and leave the rest of his life implicit. His adults, however, do not suffer as noble a fate. See Abdel Seid Ahluani, protagonist of “Tell El Aqqaqir 1943” (1977). Following the battles of El Alamein, his tribal home in the Egyptian desert is much changed; where there are no landmines buried in the sand, there are bits of tanks and cannons jutting toward the sky. The desert “no longer belongs to us,” says Abdel Seid’s father. But Abdel Seid is not like his father; he is more enterprising, and sees money to be made off the scrap metal. With a friend of his, he goes out and starts to strip the metal from the ruined tanks. But soon the two men begin to suffer for their enterprise; the friend, Ahmran, deliriously walks out into the minefield and finds his death, whereas Abdel Seid lives long enough to find his arm completely transformed into scrap-metal. He returns to his tribe, but his father rebukes him; he had been against this scrap-dealing, and compares his son to “some poor dog, groveling for my help.” Finally, the father shuns Abdel Seid and takes him to the desert, where, transformed into metal, he stands among the military ruins as a monument to his own hubris. Somewhere, Percy Bysshe Shelley sighs.

There’s an unmissable undercurrent of judgment here: the father laments the loss of the Old Land, the Old Ways, and the son, in trying to survive and prosper in spite of external havoc, is punished. Between a tank and a hard place — to Toppi, even the victims are corrupted by their very victimhood, forced to choose between death and living damnation. As for the father, he might be cruel, but in a way that Toppi seems almost to envy. To him, and only to him, those old ways are still alive. He may be starving, but in the amber of his memory he is still pure, unsullied.

“The spirits do not speak with the voice of rifles,” says a New Guinean native in “Hidden Face,” the undated story that closes out the collection, and one cannot escape the sense that it is the cartoonist speaking through him, envious that they still have spirits with recognizable voices. In Sergio Toppi’s world, armies are destructive without being protective; their very existence is an annihilation, a corruption. But it is an annihilation and corruption of the other, and in that distance of externality there is some relief. It is a terrible thing, to corrupt someone else — but to Sergio Toppi it is worse yet to be corrupted. In the latter, you’re left with nothing; in the former, at least your hand-wringing will get you published.

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