He was the Greatest. Almost everywhere he went, Muhammad Ali reminded people of that. Sometimes with a smile and a wink, and sometimes he had a more serious tone. Ali even had a Saturday morning cartoon, of course called I Am the Greatest. But the good men do sadly doesn’t live long after them. His name may still ring, but the impact of his life might be getting lost to time. Marc Bernardin and Ron Salas’ Messenger: The Legend of Muhammad Ali will hold that loss off a while longer.
We used to tell our legends around the fire. Messenger updates that with a father and daughter watching television in 1996. It’s the moment that capped Ali’s legend — the lighting of the Olympic Torch in Atlanta. The flicker of the campfire replaced by the flicker of the cathode ray, it’s an appropriate place to dive into 12 rounds of Ali’s life. As Bernardin told me in July, you can’t capture the entirety of his life in one graphic novel. But you can use the form to explain why that life had meaning.
Our culture loves backstory, so the first round focuses on young Cassius Clay, learning the lessons that would make him quite possibly the greatest boxer who ever lived. Rightly, Bernardin and Salas strike a balance between the actual boxing lessons and the integrity they would help forge. Because though important historical matches loomed large in Ali’s life, it was how he stood up for social justice that makes him a legend.
As readers will see, it cost him some of his prime years in the sport he dominated. It’s hard to say that integrity actually cost him fame, though. It may have built it. And though the champ playfully amplified his ego at times, Bernardin lays out how he used that fame for the good and the right. Yes, some scenes and dialogue may have been juiced and rewritten for dramatic impact, but to paraphrase Don Quixote, facts can be the enemy of truth.
Salas’ art is just about perfect. As a storyteller, he conveys the energy of the young man, yet perfectly captures the later stiffness of the lion in winter. Ali at the 1996 Olympics should not be seen as tragic — instead, Salas conveys the pain and the putting aside of the pain by a man who understood that as big as he was, the need for inspiration was bigger. (Yes, I had to put the book down and dab at blurry eyes.)
There’s much here you might not have known. And despite the power of this graphic novel, Bernardin still points us to more reading. He and Salas may be illuminating a legend, but that might drive us to learn more about the man. Start here. Revel in the legend. And if you know someone who needs it, pass it on.
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