Word: sturm
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...shouldn't take a small publisher, based in Canada, to bring baseball to American comicbooks, but it has. Fortunately, James Sturm's rousing, brass-band-and-hoopla wonder, "The Golem's Mighty Swing" (Drawn & Quarterly; 108 pgs; $11.95) is more than equal to the task...
...first inning for the Stars, including three full pages on the at-bat of Moyshe, Noah's younger brother, who uses shoe polish to fake a beard. Panel after panel has him fouling away pitches, waiting for the right one, creating a metronomic visual rhythm as the tension builds. Sturm has figured out that a large part of baseball's appeal lies in its structure of little dramas making up the larger one, and he carries this through the entire book...
Printed on off-white paper with black ink and a very subtle gray tone for shading Sturm has a simple comix style that perfectly complements the kind of Americana he writes about. He uses old photographs for reference, particularly when drawing the players in action, but distills the details down to the fuzziness of memory. It feels like looking at an old snapshot album that actually tells a story...
...With the strategy of a top manager Sturm artfully mixes Jewish mythology with the mythology of baseball as a way of exploring the myth of America. It's a big subject, and not an easy one. You can tell when the baseball-as-America metaphor gets used as an easy trope by a literal player-hater. But "The Golem's Mighty Swing," has the beauty, universality, thoughtfulness, and sweep of baseball at its best...
...Which shows exactly why all the Sturm und Drang over the White House's supply-side prescription for meeting the U.S.' next-few-decades energy needs is a bit misplaced: Dick Cheney isn't throwing money at Big Energy, he's just throwing open the gates. The folks that will design the U.S. power picture over the next decade or two will be the energy companies themselves - and that means it'll all come down to we, the consumer...