The Golem's Mighty Swing
by James Sturm
Drawn and Quarterly Publications

While the conversion rate may not be exactly 1,000-to-1, pictures really are worth quite a few words. Pictures go a long way when an author is trying to create a place readers can pace around in, mentally.

With "The Golem's Mighty Swing," author/illustrator James Sturm animates the sideshow world of 1920s minor league baseball, where costumed teams like the Hoboes, Zulus and Top Hats battle each other in a theatrical style of baseball somewhat reminiscent of the WWF.

The story follows the exploits of "The Stars of David," an all-Jewish minor league team assisted by the incredible power of Henry "Hershl Bloom" Bell. Bell is a black player ostensibly from "the Lost Tribe," but he's more accurately a 20-year veteran of the Negro Leagues.

Right off the bat, Sturm gets you inside the game, with pitch after pitch against players you quickly come to know. Panel after panel of detailed baseball gives his narrative a surprisingly vivid ability to communicate the game's nuances: bunts, fouls, broken bats and beanballs all come across with crisp immediacy.

Although the book carefully renders the dusty baseball diamonds of small-town America, its real story is about race and prejudice. "The Golem's Mighty Swing" uses the old Jewish folk story of The Golem — an animated clay statue that was built using Kabbalistic magic — to tell a story of the mortal peril and fear that blacks and Jews once faced on a daily basis in America.

The racism of the 1920s was quite different from the creeping, slithering variety of hate modern Americans are familiar with — it was brash, open, and sometimes personified by the roaring hatred of the lynch mob.

By mid-book, the Stars of David are outfitted with a Golem costume, to boost audience reaction and attendance figures. But the visceral response the team gets in one small town gives readers a vivid sense of the passions running beneath the surface of American life.

Sturm's dialogue, detail and sense of human interaction are superb. "The Golem's Mighty Swing" has a pacing and sense of drama often lacking in comic books, and it lacks the leaden, preachy feel that some historical comics get swamped with while they wrestle with their topic. Once you've picked up the book, Sturm's clean, engaging drawings bring you into his world. You stay willingly.

"The Golem's Mighty Swing" is the third in a series of historical graphic novels by Sturm, following in the heels of "The Revival" (centered on faith healing) and "Hundreds of Feet Below Daylight," which examines a massacre of Chinese workers in an Idaho mining town. Sturm has a restrained and powerful talent, and it's shown off to great effect in "The Golem's" 100 pages of art and dialogue.

— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)