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A boxing match between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries—billed as the “Fight of the Century” when it happened 113 years ago in Reno, Nevada—leaps from the pages of new graphic novel “Last on his Feet: Jack Johnson and the Battle of the Century.”
Indianapolis native Adrian Matejka wrote the text for the graphic novel, which can be viewed as a companion to “The Big Smoke,” his award-winning 2013 poetry collection inspired by Johnson.
The books, however, are not redundant. Just one poem from “The Big Smoke” appears in “Last on his Feet,” a 319-page work featuring art by Youssef Daoudi.
Matejka, a Pike High School alum and the editor of Chicago-based Poetry magazine, said he needed to develop new skills for “Last on his Feet.”
“Everybody thinks it’s easy,” Matejka said. “They think it’s easy to write a poem, and it’s not. They think it’s easy to paint a picture, and it’s absolutely not easy. It’s art. So I got humbled real quick when I was trying to write the first version of [‘Last on his Feet’], because I didn’t even know that I needed to write a script.”
The idea for tackling Johnson’s story in graphic-novel form originated at the 2013 National Book Awards in New York City, where Matejka’s “The Big Smoke” was a finalist in the poetry category. After the top prize went to someone else, Matejka was uncertain about his next move.
He wanted to devote more work to the legacy of Johnson, but he wasn’t interested in writing a second volume of poetry about the first Black heavyweight boxing champion.
Looking around the venue that hosted the awards ceremony, Matejka decided to try something new when he saw the cover of Gene Luen Yang’s “Boxers & Saints” graphic novel displayed on a large video screen.
He remembers telling a friend, “It should be a graphic novel.”
Nearly a decade later, “Last on his Feet” is set for release on Feb. 21, addressing issues of racism, violence, domestic violence and changing technology that resonated long after Johnson and Jeffries squared off on Independence Day in 1910.
Daoudi, a native of Morocco who lives in Paris, contributes dynamic illustrations using the colors black, white and red. His previous work includes 2018 graphic novel “Monk!: Thelonious, Pannonica and the Friendship Behind a Musical Revolution.”
“If you can make Monk’s music dance on the page, then you can handle Jack Johnson,” Matejka said of Daoudi’s tribute to the jazz iconoclast.
For Matejka, the task began with writing the previously mentioned script.
“I worked from the script, but I changed things and wrote new scenes,” he said. “I wrote a short story at one point, because I couldn’t get [Daoudi] to see what I wanted to do through the script. I wrote 40 new poems. Some ended up in there and some didn’t. But it was all in service of this story that felt like it needed to be symphonic.”
Johnson won 72 of his 95 professional bouts. In 2018, he received a posthumous pardon for Mann Act offenses, or transporting a woman across state lines for “immoral purposes,” that landed him in Leavenworth penitentiary for one year.
The book is built upon Johnson telling his life story to an audience, a format that allows for a non-linear chronology.
“I learned so much from Youssef, who said ‘You have to remember that we’re looking at things and thinking about this as a conversation between text and art. If you describe this, it’s just going to bog things down. We have to figure out how to make it happen in action,’ ” Matejka said.
The fight sequences created a challenge, he said.
“It’s one thing to let your imagination work,” Matejka said. “It’s another thing to see Jim Jeffries’ face getting smashed in over the course of a book. I had to change some of the language because it meant something different when the picture was there. It’s one thing if he’s saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I beat the mess out of this guy,’ in some kind of Jack Johnson style. It’s another thing entirely when you see him doing it. How can you create empathy for a person who is very clearly destroying somebody else?”
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