James Sturm 2001
THE GOLEM'S MIGHTY SWING
Published by Drawn & Quarterly Books
©2001 James Sturm

Sturm's tale of a barnstorming baseball team of Jews is a unique take on both Baseball history (of the 1920s) and on racial animosity. Broken into three parts, we have the introduction of the team and what it is like to be a smalltime baseball player going from town-to-town; in the second part the disastrous undertaking of adding a 'golem' to the team as a gimmick; and in the third part a short 6-page tale telling us what happened to the cast. The story is carefully structured and the artwork highly controlled. Though on the whole this is not a "novel," it is a well-crafted "long" short-story.

There are brief vignettes throughout, giving us a view of Sturm's 1920's America. When Noah Strauss, our narrator and manager of the "Zion Lions", maddens his younger brother Moses, we follow him when he goes for a walk alone through one of the small towns they've been playing. Mo roams about depressed, witnessing hard looks and poverty. When he is harassed by some children who want to see his horns (one of the anti-Jewish canards brought up in the tale), 'Mo' ends up in a confrontation with some of the locals. It's just a setup, though, because while it looks like MO is about to take a beating, Sturm veers off to where Noah Strauss meets Victor Paige, a promoter who introduces the idea of the Golem conceit. When we are returned to Mo's fate, expecting the worst, instead we see the locals and MO just talking baseball.

But what is baseball? Sturm tells us, via Noah Strauss, on page two that "baseball is America." With that propositioned, he repeats it with a different set of details about what is baseball on page 58. This is the most important (and biggest) game of the season for Strauss' team. We see men selling programs, scorecards, peanuts and popcorn; townspeople (black and white) crowding into a stadium for segregated seating, and Mr. Putnam, the man paying for the team that's pitted against the "Zion Lions," accompanied by a police bodyguard. We know from the preceding pages that Putnam also owns the local paper that has published an editorial about the nearly apocalyptic importance of the "Putnam All-American" team beating the "Zion Lions," who are "...dirty, long-nosed, thick-lipped sheenies; they stand not for America, not for baseball, but only for themselves. They will suck the money from this town and then they will leave. A victory must be had. The playing field is our nation. The soul of our country is what is at stake." With that benediction, of course there's violence coming. But is all of this, the salesmen, promoters, owners, fans, writers and players what baseball is, and by implication from Strauss' vision from page 2, America? Sturm seems to be saying so, because it is a lone American flag shown flying above all of the proceedings in the single panel from page 58.

The secondary character of Hershl Bloom is the Zion Lion's secret weapon on the field. His name is really Henry Bell, veteran of the Negro Leagues and our guide into that periphery history. When the Zion Lion's are on the verge of ducking the game with the Putnam team because their pitcher, 'Buttercup' Lev, was beaten up at a local bar, Bloom/Bell provides some perspective:

"When I played for the Black Barons we'd head South for the spring to get an early start on the season. My second year we lost three players before we broke training camp."

"Outside of Macon, Jimmy Day was hung and set on fire."

"Pepper Daniels was stabbed four times in the throat for smiling at a white woman."

"Horace Walker just disappeared. Had he left of his own mind he would have taken his guitar."

Sturm is not shy about getting his story points across. Most of the heroes and villains of this tale ruthlessly stare out of their panels directly at the reader, demanding reaction to their actions, passions and hatreds. Sturm is merciless in exposing the pathetic (and dangerous) race-hate of his fictional townspeople, but his 6-page denouement at the end of this book, separate from the Golem tale, indicates a strange complicity between sport fan and violence in general. It is an indictment with a twist, though, coming as it does on the heals of The Golem's Mighty Swing where the victims are so victimized. But when Noah Strauss, our narrator and one of the victims, decides to re-seat himself to watch an otherwise boring baseball match, we see it is because a drunk has beaten up the umpire.

Not that Sturm does not hint at the connection between baseball and violence well before hand. In the second half of The Golem's Mighty Swing, a mentally ill character named Monroe (a bit like Elijah from Melville's Moby Dick) heralds the coming of Strauss' team to Putnam by shouting crazily "The Golem was not nurtured on his mother's milk! Not grown in a woman's womb!" Monroe is what the townspeople in the stands for the climatic game will become later; frightened, frenzied, and not at all sane. Even if it is just a large man in a wig and costume, they eventually cower before the Golem wielding a bat, keeping them from storming the dugout where the Jewish team waits for what Noah Strauss thinks is their death.

As much as there are multiple examples of anti-Semite small townspeople in The Golem's Mighty Swing, I hoped to see their evangelist reverse-twin, the Christians of the Midwest that see Jews as the Chosen People. Though that admiration is hardly a warm affection, it's still quite the opposite of all the race-baiting that seems almost uniform in Sturm's tale. But with only 90 pages there can be only so much American-profile presented – and I don't know if evangelists of that type even went to ball games in the 1920s.

Sturm's drawing style is simplified but uses many beautiful examples of figure perspective (see the 3-panel sequence provided above) and Sturm doesn't vary his attention from panel to panel by size or story importance, but instead renders each sequence the same. This static styling goes a long way toward allowing the reader to quickly get beyond self-consciously looking at small hand-drawn cartoon panels, and into the realm of pure reading.

Sturm uses a lot of black spotting and silouhettes to render shape and weight, and he has a steady embellishing style like Will Eisner. Though the line work is generally outline oriented, Sturm puts together many evocative images. For example the panel on page 31 showing the team's bus traveling through the night of a back-country road, a beautifully straightforward drawing but one that immediately reminded me of the feel of the many country roads I have traveled by night.

In respects to the production qualities of The Golem's Mighty Swing, the book itself has a nice hinged-cover and uses quality cream paper, printed with beautiful flat black inks and a second color spot gray. There is a small amount of unfortunate bleed-through from following pages, though (you can see a hint of this in the scanned pages provided here).

Altogether, Sturm has made a special comic (self-described as a "compelling picture novel" on the back cover) and I see no reason to argue that. As both fan-letter and critique, Sturm gives a thoughtful, entertaining story of race-hate, experience and the love of the game.

Written by Erik Weems ©2005
Artwork is by James Sturm Copyright©2001 James Sturm