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Underground > Comic Books >

The Golem's Mighty Swing

14:21 / 09.09.01

I bought The Golem's Mighty Swing by James Sturm ($12.95 from Drawn and Quarterly) this weekend. Its about a 1920s Jewish baseball team (The Stars of David) that travels the country playing against local allstar teams. Along the way they face the trials of poverty and antisemitism. Strapped for cash, the team decides to go along with a promoters gimick to drum up interest in their next game by creating a "Golem" out of one of their players. I quite liked it and plan to give it to my (non-comic reading) father for Christmas.

01:27 / 10.09.01

I want this comic very badly. However, I will not have any disposable income (read-comic money) until somethime in May. Therefore I am very jealous and I think you are an asshole for owning it.

James Sturm is one of about 5 individuals who draw similar to how I envision the pictures in my head coming out on paper, even if they almost never come out right.

Sample pages for all the other schmucks who can't afford it.

13:15 / 10.09.01

i love drawn & quarterly. they have such lovely production values, and they publish pretty damn good creators too.

08:17 / 05.02.02

A little thread bump.

Has anyone else read this yet? My opinions of the story have changed slightly since I first read it and I'm wondering what the rest of you think of it.

08:13 / 06.02.02

Just realised that the date this thread was started may have been one reason it didn't go anywhere. Or maybe only the two of us have read the book. Whatever.

I too am a sucker for early baseball Americana. I've been to Cooperstown three times... and I live 3000 miles away.

I thought the book was really nicely put together from front to back, the scorecards on the inside of the covers were a nice touch. I think the only thing I would have done differently is the way the title is placed on the cover. For some reason the diagonal typeface bothers me; I would have made it horizontal. The Drawn and Quarterly logo only appears on the side of the book and is in the same font as the authors name and the books title, if this had been a Marvel book the logo would have been a white box with a big red MARVEL on the top of the spine, ruining the overall package.

I think its interesting that you feel like D&Q are trying to convince you that their books are something more than well crafted stories by placing nice covers on them. Do you think the packaging misrepresents whats inside? Or is it just the fact that these are comics and, as such, shouldn't have classy covers. Seems to me that the covers should try to attract the type of people that would enjoy the story inside in the same manner that a movie poster should be aimed at the films target audience. It doesn't really matter to me what kind of paper marvel prints their comics on, its the crap covers and advertisements that make their books look like shit.

As for the story itself, I was just starting to read the Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay when I bought The Golem's Mighty Swing. Chabon was on NPR for weeks talking about Jewish folk tales and myths and here was this book about Golems and Baseball. I loved it. Looking at it now, it suffers from the same thing I think most comics suffer from: the fact that drawing a comic is a long process. The book was 100 pages but it could have been stretched to 300 easily. I wanted to hear more of Henrys stories, see more of the ball games, get a better feel for the minor characters but the ammount to time it takes to draw a single page means that the story gets told in shorthand.

16:05 / 07.02.02

No, you misunderstand me. I don't think that the quality of the cover has anything to do with expectations for the book. I think that Drawn and Quarterly's name on the cover lends expectations to a book. I've observed that in some desperation to 'legitimize' some comics, there's a weight given to books by certain publishers, regardless of the merit of the books themselves.

16:34 / 07.02.02

That having been said, there's something about it...that has me feeling that some of the quality of the story is in my expectations for it, almost like there's an inferred quality just because it's not a tights book...The D&Q logo on the cover instantly elevates the status of the book...

I thought youwere speaking strictly for yourself, that you had high expectations because it was a book that had nothing to do with superheros. Funny, because I usually have low expectations of "real world" comics unless I've already seen the work of the creators.

I feel at times like I've been duped - that much of the D&Q library, as well as that of publishers like Fantagraphics is packaged in a way that suggests I'm supposed to evaluate the book as literature, when it's really just a well-crafted story, but nothing more.

It was this that made me think you were talking about the covers of the books.

I think that any weight given to the D&Q logo has to do with their track record of publishing good comics in the same way that the Marvel logo means (to me anyway) great superhero characters in crap stories. Sure there are exceptions for both publishers but I'm not sure the small(er) press publishers have fanboys that will buy (or hype) their books just because they published them. I don't read much comics criticism, maybe the reviewers in TCJ do like the indy books more than they should but I always assumed that was because Groth paid their bills.