King and the Golem's Mighty Swing

The King Vol.1 by Ho Che Anderson

I found the author’s preface to be rather moving; It was reassuring that what I was about to read about Martin Luther King wouldn’t just be another repeat of all the glorified versions told in school. The beginning was hard for me to understand, like, I know its supposed to show how life as a minority is still as violent as it was before desegregation and that racism is just hidden and denied now. But it took a few reads for me to even understand what was going on inside the panels. Then it took even longer for me to link the depicted violence to the point Anderson was trying to make about race violence being worse today than ever. It was rather frustrating.

Another thing I noticed that was frustrating was how sexist everyone was. I mean, I’m no hardcore feminist, but even I noticed when the King family’s guest had a comment about how good dinner was and that Mrs. King “knows her place”. Seriously, lets see how many ‘women belong in the kitchen jokes” we can make. MLK Jr. only makes it worse by commenting on a date how he believes women belong in the home, fulfilling more traditional roles. The girl then is offended and as he drops he off, he proposes. And to make it worse, apparently it was their 3^rd date. Yes date numero tres. Yeah. I see no logic there. At all.

The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm

The first thing I noticed was how baseball centered it was, and I was surprised at how much I liked it. I thought it was just going to be another “we’re a minority and everyone hates us”, but this one was more based around a specific baseball team named the Stars of David. And although many of the players were Jewish, some were not. But that didn’t matter to the people they played, nor to the spectators. So it shone light on the peoples ignorance along with their racism.

It surprised me that the story went so far as to reference the Kabbalah seeing how many people (or at least to my knowledge) don’t know too much about it, or even what it is. So needless to say, it made me very very happy to see it addressed. I also was happily shocked when the main character spoke of golem’s and their true nature. Very rarely in books, comics, or any other storytelling device that involves golems do they ever get their source explained, much less their true nature. And so to have a story revolving around baseball explain something like that made me rather happy.

All in all, this one was actually fun to read, unlike the MLK one. Maybe it was because I could actually tell the characters apart, or maybe because it was a story I haven’t heard before. No matter the reason The Golem’s Mighty swing was the one I actually finished reading.