Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow by James Sturm & Rich Tommaso
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“Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow” by James
Sturm & Rich Tommaso (Hyperion/ Jump At The Sun, HC: 9780786839001, $16.99; PB:
9780786839018, $9.99) This excellent comic-book-style biography portrays the life of peerless pitcher Satchel Paige from the viewpoint of a fellow Negro League baseball player whose parallel story shines a light on the numb and crushing experience of being a second-class citizen in early twentieth-century America. In perfectly paced words and illustrations, Paige’s oddball, grandstanding career arrives like a cool drink of water that reminds his fans of their absolute worth and equality. In 1929, our viewpoint character, Emmet, enjoys a brief, hopeful time playing in the Negro League, which he has to leave when an injury ends his baseball career. After returning to his hometown of Tuckwilla, Alabama, he does the back-breaking work of a sharecropper indebted to a family of White landowners. Still, he follows Paige’s ongoing rise to baseball stardom as the renowned prince of pitchers travels the country playing exhibition games against players of all colors. Sturm and Tommaso use the comics medium to perfection as they depict Paige’s idiosyncratic playing style. As they explain, the lanky pitcher was a master of the head game, of taking his time, working his jaw, and conjuring distractions for his batters. Their well-paced picture panels show it best: the pause, the wind-up for a fastball, the flailing limbs, and then--BOOM! The ball already safe in the catcher’s mitt, and a strike called. Each pitch sequence is excellent, and together they create a tense and exciting atmosphere that perfectly conveys why Satchel Paige was such a sensation. Emmet and Satchel’s stories intersect once again when Paige’s team comes to play an all-star game against the hot-shot sons of Emmet’s insufferable landlord, Mr. Jennings. Rolled up in that game is a lifetime’s worth of resentment and double standards: Emmet has struggled to give his son, Emmet, Jr., the opportunity to attend school and thereby avoid being pulled into sharecropping, but his landlords have done their best to crush that hope, using threats of violence to keep the boy down on the farm. (There’s a full two-page spread that shows the day Emmett, Jr. must join his father in the cotton fields, and it is one of the most heartbreaking and soul-shaking images I’ve ever seen.) When Satchel Paige soundly bests the arrogant Jennings boys before the amused eyes of all Tuckwilla, Emmet feels his heavy burden of injustice lighten just a bit: “For the first time since I played ball,” he says, “since Emmet, Jr. was a baby, I felt somethin’ on the inside. I remembered the type of man I am.” “Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow” is an uncommonly fine graphic novel, just like “Houdini: The Handcuff King,” the previous volume in the fledgling series of graphic-novel biographies from Hyperion Books and the Center for Cartoon Studies. Both books tell exhilarating stories of famous Americans, and each deserves a place in all library collections serving young readers. (Future volumes will focus on Henry David Thoreau and Amelia Earhart.) Review by Mark David Bradshaw, December 12, 2007 Read a review of “Houdini: The Handcuff King” by Jason Lutes & Nick Bertozzi: http://www.watermarkbooks.com/review0607-009.html
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