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[Robb_K]

I don't remember any Reading Group review covering any sports books, so I'll offer 2 US Sports biographies from the late 1940s and early 1950s, boxer, Joe Louis, and baseball player, Jackie Robinson.  I'll be curious to see how the 2 books from Fawcett Publications stack up against each other.

Joe Louis 2:
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=77544

Jackie Robinson 1:
https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=67936

I looked for sports books from a country other than USA, but didn't find one.  We had several about hockey players in Canada, but CB+ doesn't have any of them.  I had hoped to find a British or Australian one, but no luck.

[gregjh]

I wasn't expecting much from these comics as the subject matter wasn't of my personal interest but boy was I wrong! Both of these comics were excellent. The drawings were made with skill and passion in every panel, the coloring was striking and the writing was classy. There was more dialogue than I usually prefer in comics but that's because they were also functioning as educational biographies.

Both stories were gripping, too. I knew nothing of either of these men to start with (I'm not American). In particular the Louis story had me approaching each of his fights with interest and the Robinson story is truly heart-warming and inspirational. Without wanting to get political, I can't help but wonder if those proclaiming the US is inherently racist today and has not acknowledged the contributions of black people could benefit from these comics.

Robb, thank you for choosing comics that I otherwise would have overlooked.

[SuperScrounge]

Joe Louis #2

Boxing Oddities - Cute.

Joe Louis - Not bad. I knew of Joe Louis, but not being a boxing fan I didn't know a lot about his career, so it was interesting. Much more engaging than some non-fiction biographies.

Tiger In The Ring - Not that the sketch at the top of the page is the greatest ever, but the colorist did the artist no favors by coloring part of the tiger face bluish-grey. The article was okay for a sports article.

Victory For Jimmy - Okay story.

Gene Tunney - Interesting.

[SuperScrounge]

Jackie Robinson #1

I'm not a baseball fan, but it was a very good biography.

[The Australian Panther]

Here, 'Downunder' I have heard of both Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson. These are names often  cited in US books, comics, movies, music and TV shows, so many of us know the names but not necessarily what the men behind them did.
Currently I find US and UK comics disappointing and unimaginative because of the disproportionate number of comics which are superhero, about post-apocalyptic scenarios or fantasy. In other words not able to deal with reality. I much prefer much  of the Current work coming out of France.
I see there are 7 issues of Jackie Robinson and 1 of Joe Louis. Fawcett must have thought there was a market. There have been a few attempts to do Sports comics.
So lets have a look at these.
Joe Louis #2 - This is a story that deals with more than one issue.
First - Joe's perception that because he has a limited vocabulary he will be disrespexcted,.
Secondly - the very real disrespect from the presumed NAZI Schmeling.
The story starts by placing Joe as Heavyweight champion of the world - in other words he already has deserved respect.           
When he wins, 'The text reads, 'The way I see it, all of us won that fight'
Which is the editorial message that Fawcett wants to leave us with.
All Joe's fights here are presented as moral victories - he doesn't just emerge the victor, he shows himself to be the better man.
And he's portrayed as driven to prove it.
Seems that Joe was the Muhammed Ali of his day.
The Art effectively tells the story as does the words. No pyrotechnics.
The text mentions boxer Max Baer. His son, Max Baer Jr, was Jethro in the Beverley Hill-billies. 

Jackie Robinson - The art is good on both books, but somewhat better here.
Both these books deal to some degree with Racial Prejudice, but you just know it was worse than portrayed here. That fact adds to the respect you have to have for these sportsmen.
I find this story to have a lot of facts and figures and technical jargon, so I found it less interesting than the Loe Louis story.
Thanks Robb!

[crashryan]

Thanks for suggesting these books. I'd never have read them otherwise. I don't care much for sports, and outright hate boxing, yet I found both comics to be worthwhile. I'll talk about the Joe Louis bio.

Joe Louis does a good job dealing with that most difficult of subjects, the comic book biography. Of course space considerations require it to be a once-over-lightly look at Louis' life. Bill Woolfolk does a good job within those limits, giving us both a career history and a sense of Louis as a person. He tends to sanctify Louis a bit but not too badly. I wish, though, that he'd been more careful introducing the characters. Louis' trainer, Jack Blackburn, isn't named until 20 pages into the story. Louis just calls him "Chappie," which would have been enough except that Blackburn also calls Louis "Chappie!" I didn't catch on to this at first and wondered a few times who was speaking to whom. Also, Louis' first wife, Marva Trotter, appears in a couple of scenes but is never identified.

As I said in my book comment, the art has a strong Charlton feel. It's especially noticeable on the hat-wearing reporters. I thought at first it might be Clem Weisbecker, but after comparing this art to Jackie Robinson, which is definitely by Weisbecker, I decided Joe Louis is by someone else. It's a respectable job.

Here's an interesting factoid. Did you know that one of Louis' pallbearers, who also helped pay for Louis' funeral, was none other than his close friend and onetime rival--Max Schmelling?

[Captain Audio]

Thanks for suggesting these books. I'd never have read them otherwise. I don't care much for sports, and outright hate boxing, yet I found both comics to be worthwhile. I'll talk about the Joe Louis bio.

Joe Louis does a good job dealing with that most difficult of subjects, the comic book biography. Of course space considerations require it to be a once-over-lightly look at Louis' life. Bill Woolfolk does a good job within those limits, giving us both a career history and a sense of Louis as a person. He tends to sanctify Louis a bit but not too badly. I wish, though, that he'd been more careful introducing the characters. Louis' trainer, Jack Blackburn, isn't named until 20 pages into the story. Louis just calls him "Chappie," which would have been enough except that Blackburn also calls Louis "Chappie!" I didn't catch on to this at first and wondered a few times who was speaking to whom. Also, Louis' first wife, Marva Trotter, appears in a couple of scenes but is never identified.

As I said in my book comment, the art has a strong Charlton feel. It's especially noticeable on the hat-wearing reporters. I thought at first it might be Clem Weisbecker, but after comparing this art to Jackie Robinson, which is definitely by Weisbecker, I decided Joe Louis is by someone else. It's a respectable job.

Here's an interesting factoid. Did you know that one of Louis' pallbearers, who also helped pay for Louis' funeral, was none other than his close friend and onetime rival--Max Schmelling?

From Wiki
"Schmeling, although he never joined the NSDAP, came to be viewed as a Nazi puppet.[citation needed] The same year, he married Czech film actress Anny Ondra."
" Long after the Second World War, it was revealed that Schmeling had risked his life to save the lives of two Jewish children in 1938.[2]"

The Press will make NAZIs of anyone if it sells tickets.

[The Australian Panther]

The Press will make NAZIs of anyone if it sells tickets.

So, how did that get started?

https://military.wikia.org/wiki/Max_Schmeling

With the coming of 1933, however, Schmeling's image in America began to take a decided turn. In 1932, the Nazi Party became the most powerful political force in Germany, and its ideologies, voiced by party leader Adolf Hitler, overflowed with anti-Semitic tendencies. Major American cities such as New York had large Jewish populations, who worried over what the party could mean for people of their religion in the future. Schmeling, because he was German, was viewed as an extension of Hitler's plans for world domination. When he was slated to fight heavy-hitting contender Max Baer on 8 June 1933, he immediately became the 'bad guy' in the eyes of fans. Baer, who did not practice the Jewish religion but had a Jewish father, came into the ring wearing the Star of David on his shorts. Promoter Jack Dempsey played up this angle and suddenly the fight was viewed as Baer defending his faith against the prejudice of the Nazis, represented reluctantly by Schmeling. Thrown off of his game in part by the bad publicity but also because of Baer's wild, brawling style and frequent fouls (including backhand punches and rabbit punches), Schmeling was thrashed after ten rounds before nearly 60,000 onlookers at Yankee Stadium. While the German took a battering against the ropes in the tenth, the referee leapt in to stop the fight.   

During the Nazi purge of Jews from Berlin, he personally saved the lives of two Jewish children by hiding them in his apartment.[6] It was not the first time that Schmeling defied the Nazi regime's hatred for Jews. As the story goes, Hitler let it be known through the Reich Ministry of Sports that he was very displeased at Schmeling's relationship with Joe Jacobs, his Jewish fight promoter, and wanted it terminated, but Schmeling refused to bow even to Hitler. During the war, Schmeling was drafted, where he served with the Luftwaffe and was trained as a paratrooper. He participated in the Battle of Crete in May 1941, where he was wounded in his right knee by mortar fire shrapnel during the first day of the battle. After recovering, he was dismissed from active service after being deemed medically unfit for duty because of his injury.

Given my current opinion of the press, I should have figured that.

[Robb_K]

Time for me to review the two books, both of which were drawn very well. 

Jackie Robinson #1
This brief, and early biography of Jackie, lasts only until the middle of his 3rd season playing U.S. Major League
Baseball, and so, is heavy on his sports career, and misses all his civic and humanitarian work of his post sports careers and life.  Also, it includes a lot of sports statistics that would probably be uninteresting to non-baseball fans, and especially to non-Americans. 

What I find most notable is the absence of the bitter hatred so many Americans had for African Americans (especially Southerners, but certainly not exclusively so).  In northern US. cities (of which ALL The Major League cities were), Jackie was spat upon, pelted by beer bottles, screamed at with curses and death threats by opposing teams' fans, jumped on and beat by opposing teams' players, opposing teams, like The Philadelphia Phillies and Pittsburgh Pirates refused to play in games if The Dodgers would play Jackie, some of his own Dodger teammates refused to play for the team if they assigned Jackie to play for their organisation's top team, Brooklyn.They were traded.  The most important of these was former National League batting champion, Fred "Dixie" Walker, who was promptly traded away to The Pittsburgh team, the day after he made that statement. 

I understand that Fawcett Publications had to be careful not to anger the parents of too many potential readers, by pointing out (towards) the ugliness of the rampant racism in USA (even in that nation's northern states) as it might be considered too political (and un-American) to make the country look "bad".  So, Fawcett's editors put as little in on that subject, as possible.  The major part of the story is that Robinson had to live through "Hell" to make way for the opening up of opportunities for other African-Americans to finally be allowed to start competing for opportunities to make better lives for their families (albeit that they still, to this day, don't compete on a fair and equal basis for those chances).  The proof of that incredible pressure he was under for many years, was his early aging, and early death at the young age of 56 from long deadly illnesses.

Joe Louis #2
This, being Book Number 2 of Fawcett's 7-book series on Joe Louis, differs from Fawcett's Jackie Robinson's one-book biography, in that it starts with Joe already being World Champion of boxing, and, thus, a World famous celebrity.  But, the two stories of Robinson and Louis are similar in that both men took on the hopes and dreams of their people's dreams for fair treatment (equality) in their own country.  Joe Louis, being before Jackie Robinson's breakthrough into the formerly segregated top levels of his sport (baseball), in a country segregated not only by law in its southern states, but de facto in its other states through the underlying racial hatred infiltrating most aspects of daily life, was the great hope of African Americans to show to The World that they were just as capable as so-called "Caucasians".  So, Joe was carrying a lot of "responsibility" on his shoulders, as well.  By beating Adolf Hitler's German (so-called "Aryan") boxing champion, he could prove that people with roots from Africa who were denigrated as an inferior race by Hitler and his Nazis, were better at something than the so-called "Master Race".

I liked the "Victory For Jimmy" story, extolling the usefulness of learning "the manly art of boxing", and the moral and practical lesson of standing up to bullies.  I also liked the brief one-page biography of mid-to-late 1920s World Heavyweight Champion, Gene Tunney.

[gregjh]

Currently I find US and UK comics disappointing and unimaginative because of the disproportionate number of comics which are superhero, about post-apocalyptic scenarios or fantasy. In other words not able to deal with reality. I much prefer much  of the Current work coming out of France.

We're probably both showing our age here. I personally find most modern comics irritating too, but for different reasons. I feel there is an endless one way political ideology pushed which makes characters predictable, dull and shallow. I don't mind the majority of comics being superhero, probably because I read them for nostalgic purposes. With that said I can see that comics can also serve as excellent sources of education.

Robb you make some good points about some of the racism being skirted over in Robinson's story. I wonder if it's because the story was partly aimed at children (as shown in the introduction) and he/they feared that truly exposing what he has suffered would scare or deter younger readers from enjoying baseball.

[Robb_K]

Currently I find US and UK comics disappointing and unimaginative because of the disproportionate number of comics which are superhero, about post-apocalyptic scenarios or fantasy. In other words not able to deal with reality. I much prefer much  of the Current work coming out of France.

We're probably both showing our age here. I personally find most modern comics irritating too, but for different reasons. I feel there is an endless one way political ideology pushed which makes characters predictable, dull and shallow. I don't mind the majority of comics being superhero, probably because I read them for nostalgic purposes. With that said I can see that comics can also serve as excellent sources of education.

Robb you make some good points about some of the racism being skirted over in Robinson's story. I wonder if it's because the story was partly aimed at children (as shown in the introduction) and he/they feared that truly exposing what he has suffered would scare or deter younger readers from enjoying baseball.

I'm sure those were factors.  But the major factor was fear of alienating, and potentially angering and insulting a majority of parents of the children who read the books, leading to complaints to the editorship, and a bad name being attached to the publishing company.  That was because the outward, bad treatment of African Americans was just the most publicly visible tip of the iceberg of the institutionalised restrictions, denial of rights, and methods to keep those people in much lower status with a 2nd-class (or 3rd Class) citizenship, which was not only demonstrated outwardly by the bulk of The US Southern "Caucasian" (so-called "White" population), but also a reasonably high percentage of The Northerners, as well as most of the other Caucasians, who were, at least, complicit with that status quo of affairs, by not complaining that that system was inhumane.   They didn't want to face the fact that the so-called "Land Of The Free" and "Land Of Opportunity" wasn't "free" or a fair playing field, for all people born there (unfair and unequal treatment for a minority, but still a significant portion of the population).  Writing about this "ugly secret" was not a way to make tonnes of money from reaching mass markets.  Besmerching the name of one's country is not a way to ingratiate the bulk of that country's citizens who make up your potential market.  It also would have made many rich and powerful enemies for a relatively small publishing company, or, even the largest and wealthiest of them.