Last on His Feet
Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
A groundbreaking graphic portrait of boxing legend Jack Johnson, Last on His Feet offers a front-row seat to the Battle of the Century.
On the morning of July 4, 1910, thousands of boxing fans stormed a newly built stadium in Reno, Nevada, to witness an epic showdown. Jack Johnson, the world’s first Black heavyweight champion—and most infamous athlete in the world because of his race—was paired against Jim Jeffries, a former heavyweight champion then heralded as the “great white hope.” It was the height of the Jim Crow era, and spectators were eager for Jeffries to restore the racial hierarchy that Johnson had pummeled with his quick fists.
Transporting readers directly into the ring, artist Youssef Daoudi and poet Adrian Matejka intersperse dramatic boxing action with vivid flashbacks to reveal how Johnson, the self-educated son of formerly enslaved parents, reached the pinnacle of sport—all while facing down a racist justice system. Through a combination of breathtaking illustrations and striking verse, Last on His Feet honors a contentious civil rights figure who has for more than a century been denied his proper due.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
