MARK EVANIER
Sam Glanzman, comic artist. Born: 5 December, 1924 in Baltimore. Died: 12 July 2017, in Brooklyn, aged 92.
Sam Glanzman, a comic-book artist and writer who for nearly 80 years brought a gritty, richly detailed style to illustrating war stories, including his own, died on 12 July in Maryland, New York. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by Drew Ford, a publisher who is editing reissues of Glanzman’s works.
Duringthe Second World War, Glanzman served in the Pacific on the destroyer Stevens, where the diary he kept, the sketchbooks he filled and the experiences of his shipmates became raw material for the comic books he created decades later.
In about 70 stories for DC and two graphic novels for Marvel, Glanzman vividly recreated his experiences in nearly three years of naval service – the training, the battles, the shore liberties and the mundane times when little happened.
In one story, he contemplated what the men dreamed about during months at sea when their ship “becomes like a planet orbiting in space – a world in and of itself.”
A young sailor tears up at thoughts of his family farm. An older sailor hopes to return to Manhattan’s urban jungle. The ship’s cook wants to be a chief petty officer. And the torpedo man “tied his dreams around the tubes of TNT he’d someday direct into the enemy.”
Their reveries are interrupted by an attacking Japanese airplane that the crew shoots down, as described by Glanzman with enormous excitement: “Every gunner had his sight trained on the ‘meatball’ – and speared it in midair. The flaming ball etched a high arc – and disappeared in a violent eruption like the instantaneous flash of a camera!” The attack, he wrote, started and ended so quickly that it seemed like a dream.
Glanzman used what he knew about ships and naval warfare to take his tales – all based on real stories, but with the names changed – beyond the Stevens and to events that happened before he enlisted.
In a story set on 7 December, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, a character named Mac Stringer, a stewardmatefirstclass,heads into the “crazy darkness” to save men trapped inside the tool crib of the battleship Oklahoma as it begins to sink. (Nine torpedoes hit the ship; 429 men died.)
Stringer’s bravery in saving the men is commended, but when he returns to duty, he is once again stationed in the officers’ ward room, a minor job that doesn’t fit his broad knowledge of the ship.
“Seems to me, the Navy always uses guys like Stringer as stewards,” one shipmate says. “It’s stupid, if you ask me! Just because his color is black.”
And, as he did for most of his Stevens stories, Glanzman ended the story, called “Color Me Brave!” with his usual message: “Make War No More.”
Ford said that when he began to gather the rights to the Stevens stories from DC and Marvel in 2014, he asked Glanzman why he had created them.
“He got emotional,” Ford said in a telephone interview. “He banged his fist on the table and said, ‘Because they really happened.’”
Glanzman said that while he used research to augment the verisimilitude of his stories, he regretted the lie he told in his graphic novel “A Sailor’s Story” (1987). He portrayed himself as an orphan in that book, which follows him from upstate New York to his naval service.
“To this day, each night, I pray to God to forgive me for saying that,” he told Cbr.com, a comics website, in 2014. “I must have hurt my parents deeply. Mainly my pop, who was a sergeant in World War I, gassed and wounded, a real hero.”
He said that someone at Marvel–hedidnotsaywho–had suggested the orphan story line and that he had agreed “for fear my book would not be published”.
Samuel Joseph Glanzman was born on 5 December, 1924, in Baltimore. To his best recollection, his father, Gustave, “was a rumrunner” he said. His mother, the former Florence Decker, was an amateur painter. The family, which included two other sons, lived in Virginia until Sam was a teenager.
“I can remember living in a cabin, with an outhouse about 50 feet away, and the trips there, during the winter, were as cold as the North and South Poles combined,” he said in the introduction to “USS Stevens: The Collected Stories” (2016).
After dropping out of high school, he joined his brother Lew at Centaur Publications in Manhattan, where he worked on Amazing-man comics.
“His fantasy worlds were very coherent,” Mark Evanier, a comic-book writer and historian, said in an interview. “Everything was of a piece, and nothing was phony. He took a bold legend like Hercules and gave it an interesting spin. Kona was a neat comic, very silly but very convincing. He was one of those artists you’d follow anywhere. ‘We’re fighting dinosaurs now? OK, I believe it’.”
Glanzman is survived by his wife, the former Susan Ann Harris; a daughter, Bonnie Pewterbaugh; two sons, Steven and Thom; and six grandchildren. His marriage to Barbara Grimm ended in divorce.
His war stories, chiefly the Stevens tales, marked the high point of Glanzman’s career. But Evanier said he had witnessed a different sort of legacy in the fans mobbing Glanzman at conventions, seeking his autograph or commissioning work from him.
“They feel an arc to his work; he’s someone they wanted to follow,” Evanier said. “And all of a sudden, they realise that half their comics were by Sam Glanzman.” © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service
“His fantasy worlds were very coherent. Everything was of a piece, and nothing was phony”