Sybille Titeux de la Croix: Muhammad Ali (2016, Dark Horse Comics)
English language
Published Jan. 6, 2016 by Dark Horse Comics.
A biography of the boxer details how he went from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, discussing his talent in the ring and work outside to promote civil rights.
Excellent graphical biography of Ali. I really appreciated the incorporation of the various print artifacts from the various eras into the story alongside the line artwork.
Not being a particularly sports interested person, surrounded by people who are not particularly sports people, by and large, I don't feel all that bad about how so little I know about Muhammad Ali. That said, I'm glad to finally be rectifying that to some small degree, and now feel a bit inspired to reach even further. A pretty charismatic guy, Ali's political and religious journey is pretty interesting.
That said, I do think that this book has its own fair share of problems and most of those boil down to the wording and wordiness. Although I'm not any sort of connoisseur of French comics, so perhaps these will all be items that are valued in French comics. Feel free to correct me down in the comments.
The first issue that really threw me off about this comic was the fact that it's in the second person. And while this …
Not being a particularly sports interested person, surrounded by people who are not particularly sports people, by and large, I don't feel all that bad about how so little I know about Muhammad Ali. That said, I'm glad to finally be rectifying that to some small degree, and now feel a bit inspired to reach even further. A pretty charismatic guy, Ali's political and religious journey is pretty interesting.
That said, I do think that this book has its own fair share of problems and most of those boil down to the wording and wordiness. Although I'm not any sort of connoisseur of French comics, so perhaps these will all be items that are valued in French comics. Feel free to correct me down in the comments.
The first issue that really threw me off about this comic was the fact that it's in the second person. And while this is a translated comic there is no credited translator so it seems like a deliberate choice by the author. I wouldn't say it's a complete no go, but combined with the somewhat worshipful tone of the narrator at times it felt very weird!But A+ to the author for not trying to hide their biases.
The second, and probably bigger, issue is that this comic is also very wordy and the typography is laid out in a very small and dense manner. So while the book overall is not extremely big, and Ali's life was anything but boring, it was still extremely hard for me to get through. Neither a net positive or negative I suppose, but the amount of contextual detail given (and worshipful asides) did get a bit tedious at times although I suspect boxing history enthusiasts would likely beg to differ.
In contrast to this criticism, the art really stole the show for me personally. Not necessarily ostentatious or distracting, my reading for this one was slow enough that I didn't really notice until I was flipping back through to review but the page layouts for this book are extremely varied - while not sacrificing readability. Each page spread really exudes the energy of what is happening in the story at that point so everything felt extremely carefully put together.
So between the information, importance, and art, I have to say that this was a really worthwhile read (even for little old anti-sports me) and legitimately enjoyable at least 50% of the time. People who are already invested in one or more aspects of this book will likely be able to enjoy it 100% if not more. The only other caviat I would tack on is that I would consider this creative nonfiction more so then just nonfiction.
