By Zack Quaintance — During the past decade, there has rightly been a mounting examination of the problematic role football plays in society, with America’s most popular sport (and most profitable sports industry) weathering increased scrutiny. Football and the NFL have taken criticisms for a host of problems, ranging from the severe brain damage wrought upon many who play it to the way the billion dollar industry is based on a game that fosters a violent tolerance of aggression, greed, racism, and more. To be real, football is still a mostly-untouchable juggernaut. Discussions of its problems are like a lit match at the bottom of a building — an inferno could eventually burn the NFL down, but it seems equally likely a few PR moves will put it out. The vast majority of fans are either blissfully or willfully ignorant, or are capable of acknowledging problems while still supporting the league and rooting for their favorite teams on Sundays.

In cartoonist Ben Passmore’s new graphic novel, Sports is Hell, football and its damaging role within 2020 society are heavily scrutinized, serving as foundations for a story that raises questions about tribalism, self-interest, racism, exploitation, and more. Written and drawn by Passmore (Your Black Friend, Bttm Fdrs), Sports is Hell depicts a fictional, alternate-world Super Bowl, one that sees The Birds (a facsimile for The Eagles) facing The Big Whites (pretty obviously The Patriots). The characters include multiple generations of black activists, a Colin Kaepernick analog, a preening young white couple touring the world of black oppression, and a pair of anthropomorphic announcers.

Like all of Passmore’s work, Sports is Hell is engaging and crafted with a searing mix of storytelling technique, creativity, fearlessness, honesty, and smarts. There are so many great questions in this book, chief among them being whether the blind allegiance and monetized conflict inherent to football have primed society to split into factions and fight. It’s all very timely, and it all is brought together by Passmore exceedingly well.

A highlight of the storytelling technique deployed here is the cutaway scenes to the aforementioned anthropomorphic announcers, who as far as I can tell are the only blatantly inhuman characters in the book. With these scenes, Passmore delivers a running overview of carnage happening — both in the Super Bowl and the real world — while also emphasizing his central themes and adding a layer of absurdity that takes some of the edge off this very serious subject matter. The audience is essentially told the world is burning, how, and why — by a talking duck, and it just works.

Perhaps the most important theme in the story is that of football being problematic as we discussed above. The absurd and outsized racist response to Colin Kaepernick’s decision to peacefully protest systemic police violence against black people in a subtle and quiet way is in here. As is the way entire cities have been conditioned to project themselves onto players earning millions, feeling emotionally vested to the point of irrationality. Passmore depicts a lot of what the national conversation has been around all of this, bringing it to a boil in his story and then pushing the game to mostly fade in the background as his characters respond on the outside, at least until the third act.

Passmore also takes aim once again at white liberals, who festishize black oppression and are willing to be tourists within it up to the point it costs them anything serious — at which point the entire equation, including how they exploit their own privilege, instantly changes. This is all done really well, and will presumably give many white readers pause, sending them to think about their own behaviors. Passmore is one of the best creators in any medium at pointing out the intersection of convictions and comfort, dropping within one of the most brutal and difficult sequences in this book a character asking, “does this cheesy mac have gluten in it?”

If that doesn’t make you stop to think about the proportion of most folks’ esoteric self interest to actions that are damaging, I’m not sure what will. And that’s maybe the central concern of this book: for the comfortable as well as the oppressed, what is the cost of all this? What does it do to society to mutually retreat into tribalism, playing it out 17-some Sundays a week by escaping into a blatantly-fraught game like football?

Sports is Hell
Writer/Artist: Ben Passmore
Publisher: Koyama Press
Some wars are fought for religion, and some are fought for political belief, but this one is for football. After her city wins the Super Bowl for the first time, Tea is separated from her friend during a riot and joins a small clique fighting its way through armed groups of football fanatics to meet a star receiver that just might end the civil war... or become the city's new oppressive leader!
Release Date: Jan. 29, 2020
More Info Here!

Read more great writing about collected editions and graphic novels!

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.