For some of us, though, Glanzman’s work has been a lifelong source of entertainment and inspiration. 4Winds publishers Tim Truman and Chuck Dixon are among his admirers, and I’m proud to say it was Sam’s artwork that first awakened in me the urge to draw comics. In later years, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Joe Kubert, and Greg Irons (whose approach is arguably an extension of Glanzman’s flesh-and-grit brushwork) would feed my creative fires with their seminal comics. But it was “SJG” who nurtured the spark, and for that I am forever in his debt.
Glanzman has delivered stories in a variety of genres for a variety of publishers, but his genuine masterpieces of his oeuvre remain rooted in his military career. Sam contributed for years to many war comics for myriad East Coast imprints, sometimes working under pseudonyms (“Sam Decker” comes to mind). These stories usually were set during World War II or the Korean conflict, with notable exceptions: Charlton presented Battlefield Action, Vol. 2, No. 21 (October 1958) as an all-Glanzman “Special Bonus Issue!” for which the master illustrated five major battles ranging from 490 B.C. to 1945 A.D. Later, Sam’s long tenure on Dell’s Combat (1961-1966) permitted him to indulge his knowledge of and skill at rendering the Pacific naval arena of WWII. His experiences as a sailor during the war informed the best of the series, and many images – undoubtedly recalled at first hand – have proved indelible: A splash page looking across the deck of a battleship at the moon glowering over a shimmering Pacific; white-hot gunfire ripping directly at you; Japanese Zeroes exploding on the deck of their carrier. In marked contrast to the larger-than-life heroics that were the stock-in-trade of DC (typified by the Sgt. Rock yarns in Our Army At War and Marvel (Sgt. Fury & His Howling Commandos), the Glanzman stories keep a perspective on the human level, making the reader aware of the face of war as seen by the soldiers themselves – the sweaty triumphs, the dangerous mistakes, the toll of the day-to-day stress, the lives and deaths within the bowels of the battleships and submarines, or within the steaming depths of the jungles and trenches.
This sensibility culminated in Glanzman’s finest work, the U.S.S. Stevens series of backup stories he wrote and drew for DC’s line of war comics during the early to middle nineteen-seventies. These are essentially Sam’s war diaries, in four- and five-page installments. Glanzman unpretentiously rendered portraits of the many people, places, and battles he had known (or heard of from fellow servicemen). Rich in drama and comedy, battle action, tragedy, and even horror (as in “…And Fear Crippled Andy Payne,” wherein a sailor overwhelmed by fear of the war and the ever-presence of death finally lops off his hand as means of “escape”) – the U.S.S. Stevens stories represent one of the most powerful and personal American comics series to emerge for the mainstream. And yet, relegated to backup status in the much-maligned DC war comics, it remains in obscurity – a lost classic its parent company (to which Glanzman sold all rights, “business as usual” in the mainstream) will probably never bother to collect in a single volume because “it’s just a war comic.” (Please, surprise us!)
Whatever the inequalities of the comic-book business, a company cannot own a man’s memories. Sam more recently re-interpreted his wartime diaries as a pair of Marvel Graphic Novels, A Sailor’s Story (1987) and its sequel (1989); likewise masterpieces, and highly recommended reading.
Much as I admire Glanzman’s war-comic masterpieces, the Glanzman comic for me as a youngster was Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle (twenty-one issues, 1961-1967), the best of the fantasy-adventure comics and a precursor to the present volume. Kona was Glanzman’s ultimate hallucinogenic monster-adventure comic. The adventures of Dr. Dodd, his daughter Mary, her children Mason and Lily, and the white-haired caveman Kona fired my young imagination as no other comic book would.
Though often obliged to deal with ludicrously overwritten scripts, Glanzman successfully wed in Kona the spirits of Baron Munchausen and Edgar Rice Burroughs, the nineteen-fifties’ monster movies and Robert E. Howard, Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger and his Lost World and the Korda Brothers’ 1940 production of The Thief of Bagdad. The fantasy is mercurial in its dream-logic: Monster Isle’s “Cave of Mutations” floods and drains into a sinkhole that becomes a passageway to an irradiated North Pole Wilderness; a sea dragon deposits Kona and his intrepid friends into a subterranean, undersea hollow, the Kingdom of Pacificus, inhabited by extraterrestrial beings; a monster bird flies them into the mountains of Tibit, and they toboggan down to the Gobi Desert on one of its immense feathers. And much, much more: Subhuman races, flesh-eating Amazonian vines, the lost Akun people (islanders who carve mysterious stone heads, guarded by outsized, venomous Kiwi birds), and Atlantis itself. In his later adventures, Kona confronts more contemporary foes, such as the Mole (a la Chester Gould) or Captain Krym – who in a four-issue epic battle trains mutant saurians to pillage a modern metropolis. And triumphant against them all is Kona, the primal hero, armed only with his bravery, intelligence, and a bayonet!
Here be monsters, brought vividly to life by Glanzman’s raw and rugged brushwork. Page after page of dinosaurs, mutants, outsized flora and fauna of every conceivable kind, more dinosaurs, sea monsters, abominable snowmen, a phoenix born of fire… and still more dinosaurs! The creatures always looked absolutely real to my adolescent eyes, and as an adult regarding those pages, I find they still mesmerize me. The giant animals are rigorously researched and appropriately exotic, the invented fusions of different species strikingly believable, the dinosaurs’ larger-than-life reconstructions carefully patterned after – but not lifted from – the definitive paintings of Charles Knight, Zdenek Burian, and Rudolph Zallinger. Glanzman’s anthropological extrapolations are just as carefully realized, from the brutal, blue-skinned Akuns (with their elongated earlobes echoing those of primitive island statuary) to the animalistic dwellers of Pacificus, drawn from Egyptian deities and the curious melding of human and animal features proposed as a science in Charles LeBrun’s sketchbooks of the Seventeenth Century. Sam Glanzman did not simply regurgitate the usual comic-book visuals; he drew from nature, from ancient and exotic cultures, from the world as reinterpreted by his rich imagination and skillful hand.
Kona is an unabashedly delirious boy’s adventure comic, and in its day I loved it like no other. I eagerly look forward to the day I can sit down with my own son and open his eyes to the adventures of this white-haired Cro-Magnon hero. Pulling those treasures out of the plastic bags that have preserved them so long, I will share them anew with the wide-eyed boy sitting on my lap… and with the child who lives on in my heart.
Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle remains the fantasy-adventure I most identify with Glanzman (though he also worked on a Man-God Hercules series and the unauthorized Jungle Tales of Tarzan feature), and one of my all-time favorite comic books. Since that final issue in 1967, I often have had a dream in which I discover a new issue of Kona. As a teen-ager, I would dream of picking the book up off the newsstand, over-joked to find that the adventure hadn’t truly come to an end; as an adult, I dream that I pull a previously unknown Kona No. 22 out of the stacks in a used-book store, or from the bins at some overcrowded comic-book convention. In either case, my dream-self snuggles down to drink in the Kona adventure of which I’d been deprived, the Kona adventure that lives on today in some hidden recess of my own imagination, the craving for one more taste of Glanzman’s finest adventure comic. Then I wake up, and the dream evaporates…
But dreams do come true. Earlier this year, I opened up an envelope from Bro’ Tim, a clutch of photocopies previewing a forthcoming 4Winds publication. And there it was, in my hands, pages and panels from the Glanzman comic of which I had dreamed for over twenty years, taking my breath away and stirring my imagination afresh.
You now hold it in your hands. Attu was Glanzman’s dream comic, and thanks to the creator-ownership policies of 4Winds, Sam has put pen to paper so we all can read his dream project as a reality. And Attu is not just a boy’s adventure; it is an adult science-fantasy, told with Glanzman’s gutsy integrity and skill. There is nothing inherently or exclusively childlike about letting the imagination wander and sour, and Attu can hold its own any day against the novels of Robert F. Jones (Blood Sport, The Diamond Bogo, Slade’s Glacier) or the latest wide-screen exploits of Indiana Jones.
So turn the page, dear reader, and enjoy. I’m going there myself, right now.
I’ve waited a long time for this…
Thank you, Sam!
-Stephen R. Bissette
A spring Sunday in Vermont, 1989