'The Golem's Mighty Swing'

Drawn & Quarterly, 2001

Written and Illustrated by James Sturm

The barnstorming baseball teams of the 1920s are the grist for this graphic novel that follows a Jewish team, the Stars of David, through the Midwest in a broken-down bus, using the gimmick of exotic ethnicity to draw small-towners to their games. At this level, baseball is as much showbiz as sport, so to boost attendance, the team's sole black player, billed as a "member of the lost tribe," poses as a golem, a creature made of clay and brought to life by a rabbinical incantation. The scheme goes terribly awry, however, when the massive crowd it draws, inflamed by anti-Semitism, storms the field. Like its legendary model, this golem damages its creators. Sturm is a master of nuance, whose economical drawings effectively evoke the era, while his thoughtful compositions impressively capture action and atmosphere. He uses the national pastime to examine such equally American traits as racism and media hype. But mostly, this a particularly insightful take on the theme of immigrants caught between their traditions and the ways of a new land.


Come comment, discuss, debate and complain at Leonard T Spock's Comic Book Emporium https://forum.suprbay.org/showthread.php?tid=132755

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Part of the 'Restoration' process is done to make it possible to enlarge these images. As such, after you have opened the files in a comic book reader, some of you may actually need to shrink them down a bit to achieve the best image quality possible.

-------------------------------------------------------

After it was pointed out to me that people were getting a GonVisor popup, I am now creating these books in such a way as to have stopped that from happening. No GonVisor popup will appear on any 'Restorations' in the future.

-------------------------------------------------------

So what does 'Restored' mean? Well, with respect to all the work the scanners have done in order to make these books available, the pages were not yellow when first printed. Ugly grey newsprint? Yes, often they were. Cheap, thin paper? Yeah, that too. But not yellow. And not looking like some ancient, faded artifact.

In most cases, the changes make the books look better than they did when they were originally printed. By turning the newsprint or cheap paper they were printed on to a bright white, with crisp, clearly differentiated greys and solid black lines on top, they look very much like a new b&w comic you would buy right off the shelf today on high quality paper.

This is accomplished by directing you to read the description in one of my other uploads so this torrent will post without giving me an error.