I first met Ryan Alexander-Tanner when, writing as “Teebore,” I left comments on his Full House Reviewed website, where Ryan, as “Billy Superstar,” was reviewing (and hilariously excoriating) every episode of the terrible-but-foundational ’80s/’90s sitcom Full House. Bonding over our shared love of awesomely terrible and terribly awesome shows as well as — importantly — comic books — we teamed up with a couple of friends to launch Saved by the Bell Reviewed, a podcast that reviewed every episode of Saved by the Bell, including The College Years, the rebranded Good Morning Miss Bliss episodes when half of the future SbtB cast (and Principal Belding) was in middle school in Indiana, and the Paul Verhoeven/Elizabeth Berkely camp classic(?), Showgirls. After that, our foursome moved on to A Very Special Episode, in which we reviewed “very special” episodes of TV, like when Tom Hanks got drunk on vanilla extract on Family Ties or when Sean joined a cult on Boy Meets World.
Through it all, Ryan’s day job involved him working as an illustrator and arts educator. One of his longtime passion projects was to write and draw a comics biography of boxer Muhammad Ali. With Vol. 1 of that book completed, he recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to release print editions and hopefully raise enough funds to complete a second and final volume.
Always happy to find an excuse to chat, Ryan and I sat down and I asked him some questions about the project, including his goals, what drew him to Ali as a subject, and which one of the X-Men could take Ali in a fight. What follows has been lightly edited for clarity and content.
Austin Gorton: Let’s start easy: Give me the elevator pitch for the project, what it’s all about, etc.
Ryan Alexander-Tanner: It’s a fact-based, heavily researched dramatization of the life and legacy of Muhammad Ali, told through comics.
Austin: What drew you to Muhammed Ali as a subject?
Ryan: So many things! The initial appeal, to me, was that he spoke truth to power when he refused to enlist in the Vietnam War. I think that’s the greatest piece in his legacy and it was the main thing I knew about him when I first considered him as a subject. He’s also an incredibly appealing personality. He’s very funny and very wise and very accessible. The other big draw was that his sports career works so well in comics. I was really excited to adapt his boxing matches into dynamic comics pages.
Those were the elements that grabbed me initially and convinced me to buy a couple of books to make sure that he was the subject I wanted to spend years researching, writing and illustrating.
The more I learned about him, the more interested I became in all of the aspects of his life: his opposition to racial injustice and the way he stood up to systemic racism, his ability to manifest outcomes through self-affirmation, his humanitarian efforts, his role as a public figure with Parkinson’s disease … I could go on and on.
Austin: What is it about Muhammad Ali’s life and story that makes comics the right medium for a biography?
Ryan: When comics are used well as a medium, they’re very efficient and engaging. I did a lot of work to try to create a page-turner of a book that puts the reader in the moment. Each chapter only takes like 10 minutes to read but conveys a ton of information.
There’s expository dialogue that provides context set within scenes that recreate important real-life moments, and visuals in every panel that communicate information about the time, place and people. As I learned the story of Muhammad Ali’s life, it became clear to me that it was expansive, covering different eras, places, states of being, etc. The only singular resources I found that really told Ali’s whole story were these huge comprehensive biographies or six-hour documentaries.
I loved reading those books and watching those documentaries, but they’re not for everyone. So my goal was to present as much information as one of those long-form works in an engaging and fun-to-read comic book.
Also, boxing matches translate so well to comics! The fights are a big part of what ties the overall story together and makes it so compelling. Ali was very skilled at adhering these larger narratives to his matches, so the fights often have these really clear stakes.
It’s also great to have all these really cool action scenes that happen organically between all the personal and political events.
Austin: What makes you the best person to tell this story in this way? What are you bringing to it that nobody else can?
Ryan: I’ve spent the majority of my career as an artist developing a process of conducting research, synthesizing information and recreating what I’ve learned into comics. This is not the first comic book about Muhammad Ali, but it’s the first one that really provides a deep understanding of who he is, what he did and what it all means.
I also approach the subjects that I work on with a level of agnosticism, so rather than just trying to tell the audience what I know, I really engage the subject with an openness and a willingness to present views other than my own. I spent a ton of time learning about the Nation of Islam, for example. That religious organization, which was so crucial to Muhammad Ali’s growth and development as a public figure, is usually written about in an unfavorable manner. I did a lot of work to see that organization through Muhammad Ali’s eyes, which I think was really important to do in order to tell his story in an authentic way.
That’s just one example, but hopefully it illustrates a general approach that I took to the material.
Austin: What was the biggest — or at least most annoying — hurdle to overcome in the creation of the book?
Ryan: It was really hard to draw! Like, really hard!
Every single panel requires a ton of reference. It’s all real people in specific places, and it all happened about 60 years ago. Whenever someone uses a phone or drives a car, I have to figure out what it would look like. There are all these details that are necessary to make it look authentic, like people need to be smoking cigarettes inside all the time.
Also, Muhammad Ali is weirdly hard to draw. I’ve got a pretty extensive background drawing portraits, and Muhammad Ali is uniquely difficult. If you look at any illustrator’s drawings of him, you’ll notice a struggle to recreate his likeness. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why that is, and without getting into a hoity-toity theoretical speech about capturing a person’s essence, I think it’s because his face is composed of these sharp angles but they’re all rounded off, so there’s almost a visual paradox within his features. It’s really unique.
Austin: What’s one of your favorite things you didn’t know about Ali that you discovered while researching the book?
There was one detail that didn’t make it into the book that I really love. I had the privilege of getting to sit and chat with Bill Siegel a few times, who made the excellent documentary The Trials of Muhammad Ali, which was a huge inspiration for my book. Maybe the biggest inspiration. He told me this great anecdote about how Muhammad Ali was kicked out of the magicians union late in his life. Ali was a practicing magician for a long time and he loved performing for people, but because of his Muslim beliefs, he thought it was wrong to deceive anyone, so he’d always tell people how the tricks were done after he performed them. This got him booted out of the magicians union.
I didn’t put it in the book because it’s kind of hard to contextualize without dedicating more space to it than I think it would deserve, plus I thought it kind of cheapened the larger narrative to include this kind of silly stand for his beliefs that he made later in life in contrast to a lot of really important and socially relevant instances of him doing that throughout the book. I still think it’s a really funny story, though.
In terms of things I learned that did make it into the book, it was really fascinating to study Ali’s friendship with Malcolm X. I really didn’t know anything about it before I started researching this project. Their lives intersected in a complex way at a period that was crucial in both of their stories.
Austin: What’s a personal favorite panel, page or sequence in the book and why (yes, this is like asking you to pick which kid is your favorite)?
Ryan: Yeah, I’m gonna cheat a little on this answer by saying more than one thing.
The first one that immediately comes to mind is a page that’s based on an anecdote I heard at a book event that may have been the catalyst for this whole project. In something like 2008, I heard this story of a newspaper strike in New York before one of Ali’s early fights. Left to his own devices to promote the fight, one thing he did was attend a very hip beat poetry reading in Greenwich Village. He got up on stage and recited a poem about how he was going to beat up his opponent. I thought that was so funny and absurd and brilliant that it kind of made the lightbulb go off about Ali being a great comics biography subject. The story is told in a single page of the book that really feels like something I’d envisioned in my head coming to life.
That’s my own personal favorite, but if I’m trying to see it from an audience perspective, there’s a two-page sequence that’s a montage of the period when Ali started predicting what round he’d win a fight. The press were already incredulous about Ali’s persona, and they were really provoked when he made those predictions, and then even more so when the predictions came true. I love the rhythm of that sequence, and I kind of see it as the moment he becomes this mythical figure, like if this was an origin story about Batman, that would be the point in the story where he first puts the costume on and fights crime.
Austin: Going back to our podcasting days, if Muhammad Ali was going to make a guest appearance on a TV show as part of a Very Special Episode, what show would it be?
Ryan: If it was my personal choice, I’d pick Taxi, because I love that show and it works timeline-wise. Maybe an episode where Ali boxes Tony Danza, or he convinces Jim to quit drugs or something.
For some reason, this question made me think of Diff’rent Strokes, and then a quick Google search revealed that Ali was on an episode. Maybe I was remembering that? Ali also had a role on a TV miniseries called Freedom Road that was a mediocre historical drama. He also played himself in a biopic called The Greatest. I’m surprised that more people don’t know about it, but also, having watched it, it’s not really that surprising, ’cause it’s pretty lousy. It’s also wildly inaccurate, which blows my mind. Can you imagine playing yourself in an erroneous version of your life story? That’s crazy!
Austin: Finally, which member of the X-Men would give Ali the toughest fight in the ring in a “no powers” bout? Please show your work.
Ryan: Well, just to cut to the chase, I’m gonna assume that everyone’s in their prime. My immediate answer is Cyclops because he’s a tactical fighter with a ton of field experience. The other answer that keeps popping into my head is Psylocke, because even without powers, she’s a martial artist, and the last time Ali got in the ring with a martial artist, when he fought Antonio Inoki in 1976, it was a real debacle. Technically Inoki was a wrestler, but he was trained in the martial arts, plus he kicked Ali in the legs the whole match. Even though this fight totally sucked, it’s sometimes credited as the start of MMA fighting, which is one of the goofier claims about Ali’s legacy.
Anyway, yeah, Psylocke. Final answer.
Ryan’s Muhammad Ali Kickstarter is live and available here.
Austin Gorton also reviews older issues of X-Men at the Real Gentlemen of Leisure website, co-hosts the A Very Special episode podcast, and likes Star Wars. He lives outside Minneapolis, where sometimes, it is not cold. Follow him on Twitter @AustinGorton
