"Even at novella length, this mordantly funny send-up packs a wallop before the buzzer." -- Publishers Weekly "Amid the story's chaos and the exhausting noise of politics today, Sports Is Hell provides an unexpected clarity on the complex schisms of modern American culture while serving up a ton of laughs." -- Moe Abbas, Broken Frontier "This tale is a myth without a moral -- which makes it a dead-on parody of the good-and-evil, triumph-and-tragedy narratives fostered by organized sports." -- Etelka Lehoczky, Wisconsin Public Radio "A lacerating, darkly hilarious howl against racism, sports fandom, and tribalism in general by an artist with a distinct and necessary vision." -- Thomas L. Batten, Library Journal "[E]very moment in Sports Is Hell is a loaded metaphor for race relations in America, and they're all laid out easily and deeply." -- Justin McGuire, Multiversity "Sports Is Hell is a distorted funhouse-mirror look at contemporary American socio-political and cultural divisions that uses the hyper-violent capitalist spectacle that is the Super Bowl as both a metaphorical and literal case study of, essentially, every damn thing that's wrong with our body politic today." -- Ryan Carey, SOLRAD "With Sports Is Hell, [Passmore] dives into the ongoing turmoil within the NFL, where predominantly white leadership continues to limit the freedom of speech of players who use their public-facing positions to engage in nonviolent protest.
" -- Oliver Sava, The AV Club, 25 February 2020 "Ben Passmore's Sports Is Hell is an apocalyptic parody of racism in US sports and politics." -- Chris Gavaler, PopMatters, "Sports is Hell is another violent and outrageous satire on race relations from Passmore, in which Super Bowl riots balloon into a civil war among armed groups of football fans." -- Librairie Drawn & Quarterly "Ben Passmore's Sports is Hell is a raw political fable that uses a sports night riot to express disillusion with the calculated human sacrifices made in the interest of political gain." -- Jamie Lovett, ComicBook.com, 11 February 2020 "Ben Passmore's 2020 release through Koyama Press addresses the chaotic place where sports, capitalism, and anti-blackness meet." -- Tony Wei Ling, Guttermouth "Passmore's art and storytelling style have a raucous, goofy, manic, punk energy to them; anyone who's interested in the racial politics of sports in a post-Colin Kaepernick era should pick this up." -- Jacob Shapiro, Nobrow Press "[Passmore] uses America's obsession with football to explore themes of racism, resistance, white supremacy, allyship, identity, and alienation to do this, and he manages to do it in just sixty pages, which is a phenomenal feat to accomplish." -- Philippe LeBlanc, The Comics Beat "Sports Is Hell is a distorted funhouse-mirror look at contemporary American socio-political and cultural divisions that uses the hyper-violent capitalist spectacle that is the Super Bowl as both a metaphorical and literal case study of, essentially, every damn thing that's wrong with our body politic today.
" -- Ryan Carey, SOLRAD.