Passed away in 2012, Sergio Toppi is part of the Pratt, Crepax and Battaglia generation that profoundly changed the landscape of European comics. For this magnificent volume of the BD collection Music, the Milanese artist's work is coupled with music and his greatest goddesses. Notably those of the Roaring Twenties and the Mad Years, an era synonymous with growth and recklessness. He loves the Charleston, the Black Bottom and the Lindy Hop. This is the era of jazz, Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet. It is in this world that a modern aesthetic of American songwriting is born, expressing everything you wanted to say about man, woman or love, without ever daring to say it. In short, these songs free the word! A word that willingly uses derision and irony. The woman is mischievous and rebellious, the man is in turn an object of desire or the worst ‘nasty man’. This variety of themes feeds into all the songs that portray Toppi's Ladies. And the forgotten women of the twenties like Annette Hanshaw, Mildred Bailey and Connie Boswell, here rub shoulders with the stars of the fifties and sixties like Nina Simone, Chris Connor, Anita O'Day, Julie London or Sarah Vaughan. Clotilde Maréchal/Qobuz