A few months ago I was one of the lucky chosen few who had got to read an advance copy of "21" The Story of Roberto Clemente, a graphic novel about this legendary baseball figure. I'm really not someone who watches sports, so I didn't know who Roberto Clemente was, but as Ich Liebe Comics! blogspot readers know, I love a good graphic novel biography. Well as those of you who are familiar with the great baseball player and humanitarian that Roberto Clemente was already know, it would be hard to tell his story in any media and for that story not to be powerful. Cartoonist Wilfred Santiago's "21" is a great companion graphic novel to another great baseball graphic novel that came out a few years ago, James Sturm and Rich Tommosa's Satchel Paige: Srtiking Out Jim Crow.
Today, the color, hardcover edition of "21" arrived at Alternate Reality Comics and it's a handsome production. The only things I disliked about "21" is that it's one of "those" hardcovers that has a dust jacket and has no page numbers. I don't like dust jackets because they're rarely that attractive and they're hard to keep in good shape. I prefer when the art is placed directly upon the book (like IDW's hardcover Reid Fleming and even Fantagraphics' It Was The War Of The Trenches). Actually, though the cover art is great on the dust jacket, the image under the accursed dust jacket would have also been a good cover image to have gone with. On the subject of "21" not having page numbers, this sadly isn't the only graphic novel that doesn't have page numbers and the lack of page numbers makes referring to a scene or scenes difficult.
Anyway, sorry to have gone on at length with my two pet peeves above, but they did detract from what is an otherwise EXCELLENT graphic novel. To cleanse my rantings from your frontal lobes, please check out this link for a great trailer for Wilfred Santiago's "21": http://www.21comix.com/
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