There seems to be no face defined for topics out of the box. This little snippet from http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusFormatting tries to work around that, and also introduces separate faces for empty and non-empty topics:
(setq gnus-topic-line-format "%i[ %u&topic-line; ] %v\n")
;; this corresponds to a topic line format of "%n %A"
(defun gnus-user-format-function-topic-line (dummy)
(let ((topic-face (if (zerop total-number-of-articles)
'my-gnus-topic-empty-face
'my-gnus-topic-face)))
(propertize
(format "%s %d" name total-number-of-articles)
'face topic-face)))
That page also notes that you have to replace my-gnus-topic-empty-face
and my-gnus-topic-face
with some appropriate faces or create your own.