Thursday, November 5, 2020

On the Coffee Table: Satchel Paige

Title: Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow
Writers and Artists: James Sturm and Rich Tommaso

via Amazon


Sturm and Tommaso tell the story of the great baseball pitcher Satchel Paige from the point of view of Emmet, a fictional. black, Depression Era sharecropper in Alabama.  In his own brief baseball career, the narrator faced Paige for one at-bat, then later took his son to see him in a local barnstorming game.  In truth, more of the material is devoted to Emmet and his family's struggles in the Jim Crow South than to Paige.  The authors don't pull many punches in portraying the brutality of the white landowners.  

The material on Paige, when he does turn up, is interesting.  We see his flamboyance, his charm and his overpowering athletic skill.  Anyone wanting to learn about Paige would be better off reading Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend by Larry Tye (my review here), though there were a few new tidbits for me.  Paige had a preferred catcher throughout his career, Bill Perkins, whom Paige would insist teams hire as part of a package deal.  If there's anything about Perkins in Tye's book, I don't remember it.  Also, the authors identify Paige as the highest paid athlete in the world in his barnstorming prime.

There are four pages of explanatory notes at the end of the book, expanding the historical context of many of the panels.  I've seen this in other historically-based graphic novels and I'm not sure how I feel about it.  I get the limitations of the medium but the notebook dump approach only draws attention to the creators' inability to work more of the material into the main body of the work.

Overall, the book is interesting.  It's certainly not the most thorough exploration of the history available but it's a meaningful addition to the library, perhaps enough to draw readers to the subject matter.

8 comments:

  1. Yeah, I'm not a fan of info dumps in any form.
    Figure out how to work it into your story or leave it out.
    I feel this way especially about sci-fi when authors will info dump about the technology they've imagined, technology that no normal person would know the details of and, yet, here is Joe off the street explaining how a matter transporter works.

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    1. And it can be done. Joe Sacco's stuff is text-heavy and yet he still manages highly detailed panels.

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  2. Currently reading a book about Steve Dalkowski, a major league prospect who could never get a handle on his incredible speed, which is hyped as the greatest ever.

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    1. Just Googled him. Nuke Laloosh is based on Dalkowski. Man, I love that movie...

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    2. Reading the book has inspired me to, ah, make an effort to watch the movie.

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    3. So good, Tony! Best sports movie there is, in my opinion. Not even close.

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    4. Finally did watch it the other night. Hilarious to see the Dalko elements play out.

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    5. So glad you finally watched it! Even my wife likes it and she detests sports movies. I quote the final interview to her all the time. She always giggles.

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