James Sturm and Rich Tommaso’s graphic novel Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow ($16.99 hardcover, $9.99 paperback) received a rave review by Kevin Baker in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.  Sturm and Tommaso’s graphic novel was reviewed along with Kadir Nelson’s We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball, which is also published by Disney’s Hyperion. 

Nelson’s book, which features his superb full color paintings of Negro League greats, is not a graphic novel, but is, in Baker’s words, “absolutely gorgeous,” and “nothing short of magnificent.”  But Baker finds that Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow is “every bit as engrossing.”  In this volume James Sturm demonstrates once again that he has a remarkable ability to capture essential elements of American history in the graphic novel format.  As Baker points out that the graphic novel is not a biography of Satchel Paige, “who proves as elusive here as he was in real life,” but rather an examination of life in the Jim Crow South: “It’s a haunting story in which Sturm’s text poignantly conveys the quiet bitterness of his hero, and Tommaso’s spare, two-tone drawings brilliantly contrast the physical beauty of the old, rural South with the savagery of its social institutions.” 

Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, which was nominated for an Eisner in the new Teen Category (see “Eisner Awards Share the Wealth”), is a book that actually transcends its category—it was one of the interesting and evocative graphic novels published in 2007 and it richly deserves the kind of attention it received in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.