Customer Reviews

The Golem's Mighty Swing

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The Golem's Mighty Swing works both as a tale of Prohibition-era barnstorming baseball and as a tale of ethnic relations. James Sturm sharply observes the baseball details, including a number of interesting and authentic-sounding anecdotes about the game. And by telling the story through the eyes of a man who is accustomed to the prejudiced attitudes of the day, Sturm gives us not a rabble-rousing screed with the obvious moral that anti-Semitism is bad, but a highly evocative portrait of life as an ethnic outsider that gives us some feeling for what it's actually like.

Sturm's art is clean and says a lot with a little, as other reviewers have said. But Sturm's talent for saying a lot with a little is true of his prose as well. For a hundred-page comic, this book has a remarkable number of memorable and realistic characters. Also, the book design itself, from the color of the pages to the art inside the front covers, gives a retro feel that enhances the mood of the story.

Sturm obviously sweated the details to create something as simple in outline yet as emotionally and thematically complex as The Golem's Mighty Swing. His effort pays off. The Golem's Mighty Swing effortlessly sweeps the reader up in the story, the characters, and the setting, making for a quick read at first, and then a thoughtful mood after the reading is done.

Comics about history are rarities in this country. Comics about baseball are even more rare. Here, James Sturm has combined both to create an elegant graphic novel about a barnstorming squad in the 1920s. The gimmick behind this squad, The Stars of David, is that the players are all bearded Jews. Kind of.

The manager, fierce-looking Noah Strauss, a former bench player for the Red Sox, fields a team that also features his younger brother, Mo, a kid with huge potential if he can keep his head on straight. Mo's a little young to grow a beard, so he improvises. Noah also fudges the lineup by adding a former Negro-Leagues slugger, Henry Bell, billing him as Hershl Bloom, "a member of the lost tribe." Barnstorming is a tough business, and, strapped for cash when the team bus dies, Noah accepts a promoter's offer of a big pay day if Henry will wear the recently acquired monster costume from the contemporary German horror movie smash, THE GOLEM.

The proposed match-up with an enhanced upstate New York factory team carries electrifying potential when the hype-machine rouses an anti-Semitic furor. Despite the tension he creates, artist Sturm delivers a narrative that captures the rhythms, suspense, and gamesmanship of a great baseball match. In this tale, he looks at what baseball means to its fans, what America looked like to its immigrants, and how both of these themes lend themselves to great storytelling. All this comes with clean, well-designed artwork that represents an object lesson on the principles of great comic art. Fans of non-superhero comics will enjoy this book for its craftsmanship, while fans of baseball history will love the story.

Even though I'm not a believer in the whole theory/vision of baseball as part of the American myth, Sturm does a pretty nice job with the metaphor in this understated but striking graphic novel. Set in the 1920s, the story concerns "The Stars of David", an ostensibly all-Jewish (one ex Negro League star qualifies as a "member of the lost tribe") barnstorming baseball team. With a decent amount of talent, they tour small towns as perpetual visitors, perpetual bad guys, and perpetual outsiders, earning just enough to scrape by. Until the team captain is approached by Victor Paige, of the Big Inning Promotional Agency. Paige convinces the team to create a Golem, "a creature that man creates to be a companion, a protector or a servant" as a gimmick to increase attendance. The gimmick works, but rather too well, as when they arrive in the next town, they are met with hostility and anti-Semitism beyond what they've ever faced before. The outcome is, well, predictable, and a metaphor for the times. The art is a lesson in the effectiveness of elegant simplicity, and captures the movement of baseball amazingly well. As per usual for Drawn & Quarterly, the book is very nicely printed and produced.

The Golem's Mighty Swing, by James Sturm (108 pgs., 2001, 2002, 2003).
This is an adult graphic novel. It's exciting to see how this genre has grown out of children's comic books & now has such an important role in book publishing. Like Hollywood, most of the founders of this genre were Jewish, with Will Eisner (of blessed memory) being considered the father of it all. Maus, by Seligman became the first huge best seller that came out of this genre.
This graphic novel combines the Jewish fable of the Golem with the historical reality of traveling professional baseball teams playing throughout small-town America in the years between the two World Wars. Sturm has done an excellent job of bringing this part of history alive through his drawings & his dialogue. There were traveling Jewish baseball clubs. They did face anti-Semitism in many of the towns they played in. The Golem is an actual Jewish fable. Plays & books have been written about it. In the end the Golem always brings sadness.
Most graphic novels are slim, like this one. I would like to see some of these writer and illustrators tackle big subjects in longer many paged graphic novels of 300+ pages. I think that so far, Seligman has been the only one to explore such longer lengths.

James Sturm, The Golem's Mighty Swing (Drawn and Quarterly, 2003)

Ah, the glory days of baseball, when the game was played by little travelling teams who catered to niche markets. Such is the atmosphere of James Sturm's The Golem's Mighty Swing, a graphic novel set during the Depression and featuring an all-Jewish (with one black guy wryly described as a member of the lost tribe) team who travels the country in a broken-down bus playing in the bush leagues. They run into a promoter who decides the team could probably spice up its image (and attendance) by having said black guy dress up in the same costume used in Paul Wegener's 1920 film The Golem, and by chance, one of his friends happens to own that costume. What no one counts on is how the image of a strong Jewish personal will inflame a racist crowd...

Sturm's great strength here is that his characters never seem to take this extremely serious situation seriously at all; the narrator has a sort of wry fatalism about everything gong on around him. It's a good voice to use in telling a tale of this sort, and it gives the narrative a lighter tone than it would otherwise have. It's a pretty strong volume, on the whole, though the final section did seem to cry out for a little more fleshing out. Worth looking into, though. ***

While baseball stories set in the early 1920's can ring false with nostalgia at times, Sturm has crafted a beautiful allegory about a busload of travelling Jews. A great book for baseball and comic fans alike, soon to be collected with other James Sturm works in James Sturm's America: God, Gold, and Golems.

Author: James Sturm
Genre: Graphic Novel

Plot Summary:
Noah Strauss, known as "The Zion Lion" during his brief stint with the Boston Red Sox, is now the hobbled manager and number three hitter for The Stars of David, an independent "Jewish" traveling baseball team. Baseball was truly America's pastime in the days of Prohibition, and a good team with an intriguing gimmick, skilled players, and some marketing savvy, could make a good living by busing through small towns and taking on the local teams. The Stars have plenty of talented players, but they are missing that extra element of spectacle that can draw the really big crowds. They are barely scraping by and suffering from low morale. Their bus is in a sad state, they are forced to sleep in cheap flophouses, and they must endure the racial bigotry that follows them everywhere they go. Just when things seem to be at their worst, Noah is paid a visit by the fast-talking baseball promoter, Victor Paige. After taking in one of their games, Paige has decided that The Stars could pack the stands if only they had a Golem in their lineup. Paige goes on to explain that a film featuring a Golem (an enormous mythical being of Jewish legend) is captivating audiences in New York City, and his agency has obtained the original costume used in the film. If the Stars' hulking African American clean-up hitter, Henry Bell, would don the costume he would be sight to see. Noah reluctantly agrees to go along with the scheme after initially rejecting the offer. Paige immediately begins to hype up the arrival of the Golem in the town of Putnam, where The Stars will battle the local "All Americans." In his fervor to create interest in the game, Paige fans the flames of anti-Semitism within the community by playing on their fears and misconceptions. At game time, the stands are filled with a tense, angry and vocal crowd.

Geographical Setting: Michigan; New York City; Greenville, NC
Time Period: 1920s
Series: Part of the "American Trilogy" (non-sequential)

Appeal Characteristics:
This story takes the reader back to the days before steroids and million-dollar contracts, when ballplayers struggled to make a living playing the game that they loved. There is a mood of stoicism that runs throughout the story, as the hard-nosed players struggle with a hardscrabble existence on the road. Baseball fans that long for the purity of old-time baseball will love this book. The prose and the illustrations are clean and spare, reflecting the tone of the story. The action unfolds quickly and compels the reader to turn the page. Though this is a short book, the author does a good job of creating characters that have a depth of personality. Anyone with even a passing interest in the history of baseball will enjoy the terrible and fascinating anecdotes that these characters relate to one another.

Read-Alikes: Fans of the writing style and artwork of The Golem should check out Above and Below: Two Stories of the American Frontier (2004), by James Sturm. These two stories complete his "American Trilogy," and showcase more of his stark and understated illustrations. God's Man: A Novel in Woodcuts (1929) by Lynd Ward, will offer similarly dark, colorless, and striking images. For more on traveling teams of the 1920s, see Alan J. Pollock's nonfiction book: Barnstorming to Heaven: Syd Pollock and His Great Black Teams (2005). This will convey the racial bigotry encountered by minority ballplayers and share some great old-time baseball anecdotes. The Celebrant (1983, novel) by Eric Rolfe Greenberg, gives a realistic portrayal of early 20th century professional baseball. It also deals with the issue of Jewish assimilation. The Southpaw (1953, novel) by Mark Harris, concentrates on the gritty life of a pitcher who is trying to deal with the ups and downs that come with playing professional baseball. It is not as fast-paced as The Golem, but it is a gripping read and is narrated in a laconic tone.

Red Flags: Profanity; racial bigotry; racial slurs; some violence (off stage); alcohol consumption

Comics about history are rarities in this country. this is an awesome whiz bang grphic novel i love it i read the digital edition

Great book. A graphic novel about not just a golem, but a golem who plays baseball. Buy it to collect new or just to read for fun used. And its by a Montrealer! Grand slam.

This is the only graphic novel I have read (besides Maus) and I like the author's sense of suggesting action and continuity, with many well-done wordless frames. I must also assume that a lot of the backstory -- black players disappearing in the 1920s, weird exhibition stunts -- is accurate.

What I don't understand is the ending. I checked several listings to be sure -- yes, it really is supposed to end on page 100. It felt like a whole section of the book must have been deleted, as if my library had a faulty copy. The ending was very unsatisfying for me. What was he trying to say?

Moreover, there is NO GOLEM in the story. There is just a guy dressed up in a Golem costume. All the complex meanings of bringing a creature to life, and maybe having it turn against you, are nowhere in this story. I disagree with the summary -- the Golem does not "turn on its creators." In fact Henry manages to defend his friends with its threatening image. If Paige, the agent, is the creator, he receives no comeuppance.

It's a great baseball yarn, but it really wastes the Golem legend.