Last On His Feet

September 1, 2022

In graphic format, Pulitzer Prize finalist poet Matejka and celebrated illustrator Daoudi revisit Reno, NV, on July 4, 1910, when Jack Johnson, the world's first Black heavyweight champion, squared off against former heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries. Jeffries, dubbed "the Great White Hope," was expected to wallop the man who had challenge the sport's racial hierarchy. But Johnson walloped him, and race riots resulted. Interspersed with the fighting are scenes of Johnson's rise as the self-educated son of formerly enslaved parents.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 16, 2023
A desert boxing match becomes an epic, a tragic symbol, and a thunderous encapsulation of America’s bloody racial history in this passionately told graphic history from Daoudi (Monk!) and Matejka (The Big Smoke) about America’s first Black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson (1878–1946). The book is framed around Johnson’s 1910 Reno, Nev., prizefight against Jim “the Great White Hope” Jeffries. Between rounds, the narrative leaps backward and forward in time. A man who loved the high life and flashed enough gold teeth “to buy an automobile,” Johnson attracted racist bile not just for beating white men in the ring but also for marrying white women. The fury directed his way scorches the page in Daoudi’s harshly etched lines. In Johnson’s post-fighting years, he was harried into exile and beat his wife Etta Duryea before her 1912 suicide. Through highs and lows, he’s portrayed in all his complexity, with emphasis on his braggadocio (“I am so strong I could plant my feet and keep Father Time from moving forward”) and his canny knack as a performer (“Understand Shakespeare. Man’s behavior is in the great poet’s words”). This is a big brawl of a book that, like the greatest boxing matches, finds the poetry in the violence. Agent: Holly McGhee, Pippin.

Starred review from January 1, 2023
Illustrator Daoudi and poet Matejka interpret the life and times of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, framing their graphic novel around his 1910 championship bout in Reno, Nevada, and covering his rise in sport and culture and his undoing by the virulence of American racism. In this evocative and entrancing telling, Johnson comes to boxing through blindfolded backroom brawls for food (and the amusement of White men). His exceptional fighting skills, physique, and drive ultimately earn him much more than a meal: fame, fortune, and the ire of the existing White power structure. Johnson brashly taunts his tormentors as he racks up win after win, chasing down the White champions who refuse to fight him, but to the reader he confesses the toll taken by the racism he's been subjected to his entire life--a vitriol most nakedly expressed by the racial epithets that rain down on him from the crowd of frothy-mouthed White men packing the stands at his fights. Still, Johnson plays his hand to the best of his remarkable ability, plotting out his fights to look good as motion pictures and thereby generate him more income from movie screenings than he'd ever make from a fight's prize money, theatrically recounting his greatest matches to paying theatergoers, and always pursuing his own interests, including White women. With red ink luridly accentuating the brutal black-and-white tale, Daoudi's exceptional sense of anatomy, expressions, and choreography combine with the snap of Matejka's text to vividly depict this defiant and flawed man's struggle against a culture built to dehumanize him and equipped with laws to break him. You can't fight city hall, but Johnson lands some solid blows on his way to the mat. A knockout.

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Starred review from December 1, 2022

Creators Matejka (Somebody Else Sold the World) and Daoudi (Monk!: Thelonious, Pannonica, and the Friendship Behind a Musical Revolution) present an immersive character-study of one of the most controversial figures in sports history, Jack Johnson. Born in 1878 to parents who were once enslaved, Johnson made his debut as a professional boxer in 1898; just 10 years later, he became the world's first African American heavyweight champion. Johnson's quick ascent and defiantly proud, larger-than-life public persona so threatened the white establishment that in 1910, Jim Jefferies, the former undefeated heavyweight champion, agreed to come out of retirement to face Johnson in a match that racists across the country hoped would restore white athletes' place atop the racial hierarchy. While this hefty tome is ostensibly focused on the ensuing 15-round "Fight of the Century," Matejka and Daoudi craft a narrative that bobs and weaves up and down the timeline of Johnson's life to create a portrait of a complicated champion whose legacy has been shaped by those with a vested interest in underplaying his accomplishments for far too long. VERDICT Lyrical narration and powerfully evocative black-and-white illustration combine for an uncommonly propulsive, completely immersive biography.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.