A little Rogers Rangers action….
Mi amigo Davide Mana, Italian Frontier Partisan and guide to adventures east of Constantinople and west of Shanghai has led me to a magnificent discovery: the art of Italian illustrator Sergio Toppi.
Davide writes:
Sergio Toppi’s work was all over the place: he illustrated the Bible and did an adaptation of the Arabian Nights, he wrote about cowboys and indians, about Greek heroes and samurai, about Hannibal and Tamburlane. His comics were filed as horror, adventure, westerns…
But he was basically a writer of historical adventure, with an eye for detail that was almost the mark of the etnographer, of the anthropologist. There was art, and research, in the service of storytelling.
Of course, I was particularly drawn to the work depicting frontiers — from Los Apaches to the Seminole to the Boers. This is exactly the kind of work I love. Davide is right, the detail is there… but everything also has an edge of the fantastical, even the weird to it. For want of a better description, it’s very Howardian. Which means it slices straight in to the core of my mythical being.
So glad to have discovered this work — and I want more!
Davide Mana says
I KNEW you’d like Toppi’s art!
And I am not sure about what you could be able to find in English by him in terms of westerns and frontier stories, but for certain, the stories of the Collector were translated and published in the US, and also his version of the Arabian Nights.
The Collector is a turn-of-the-century adventurer obsessed with mysterious and ancient artefacts, so he travels the world looking for them. Very very good, strong elements from bth Howard and Lovecraft.
JimC says
Thanks for the lead!
Keith West says
I love these illustrations. I will have to seek them out.
John Cornelius says
Several of the examples you posted remind me of Frank Frazetta’s work, especially the mounted Indian with the lance. I don’t know if it is the pose or the style, or a combination, but the echo is definitely there. The one of the piper about to get brained also evokes the “frozen moment” tableau that Frazetta was so good at capturing.
Thanks for sharing!
John C.
JimC says
Undoubtedly a FF influence there. Not many women, though.
Davide Mana says
Toppi did draw quite a few women, and gorgeous women they were, and I posted a few examples on my blog, but when he painted or sketched the West, he was admittedly more interested in the men than in the women.
As for the Frazetta influence, it would be an interesting topic to research, considering the two were contemporaries.
John Cornelius says
True. Few could draw women like FF.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VZEKyNPyGkc/To81jq_UTcI/AAAAAAAAA3c/rJsfmgMtoU4/s1600/mensillo%2Bcopy.jpg
Yikes!
John C.