Sam Glanzman's A Sailor's Story!

Sam Glanzman's A Sailor's Story is a remarkable read. In this volume from Dover Books we have reprinted two vintage Marvel Graphic Novels from the 80's. When Glanzman wrapped up his U.S.S.Stevens tales in the back pages of DC war comics there was a lapse of nearly a decade before he was encouraged to tell these tales in longer form. 

The first titled simply A Sailor's Story reiterates many of the incidents and descriptions which were the basis for his short vignettes in the DC series. Here we get them repeated and tied together in a longer narrative which does provide a greater scope. We follow the day-to-day experiences of one seaman (Glanzman himself of course) as he leaves his home and his beloved dog to find a berth aboard the U.S.S. Stevens, a Fletcher Class Destroyer built in the massive wave of construction following Pearl Harbor. The ship of a little over three hundred men is cramped and filled with duties both dangerous and dull. We see our protagonist learn his way around the ship, becoming part of a team of men who are filled with a host of passions and expectations. We see him screw up and we see him succeed. We see men around him fall, but never does there seem to be a judgment about their behavior. It seems quaint in our modern era when everyone seems to feel welcome if not obliged to comment on the successes and failures of others, that in this story each man aboard ship is an island. What he does or doesn't do is his own buisness ultimately as long as he "turns to" when ordered to do so. 

In the second of the two Marvel Graphic Novels contained here titled A Sailor's Story Book Two: Winds, Dreams and Dragons, the focus shifts somewhat from the day-to-day of a sailor at sea during wartime to the war itself. This volume has more high drama and the artwork is at times stellar. Glanzman had a style which was deceptively simple and straightforward. Here we see him mix it up a bit more with schematics showing us the ships and weapons. He uses replicas of log pages to document the passage of time and travel of the ship. This tome really reads more about the ships themselves rather than the men aboard them, this is about the nature of the war in the Pacific which was terrible and frightening. In his matter-of-fact style Glanzman talks of encountering islands where Japanese soldiers and natives are killed and kill themselves in terrifying numbers. We encounter a great storm that destroys three U.S. ships and kills hundreds of men. And we encounter the the "Kamikaze", the "Dragon" of the title. These of course are the pilots who toward the end of the war crashed their planes into ships on suicide missions. The scale of these attacks was not something I quite realized as Glanzman says there was constant legitimate dread of these swift attacks. 

As a follow up to U.S.S. Stevens - The Collected Stories these tales in A Sailor's Story are somewhat repetitious, but not the same by any means. The stories here are like many tales we come across in myth and elsewhere, new iterations of a story needing to be told. In addition to the stories themselves there are loads of tributes to the talents of Sam Glanzman from a who's who of comic book talents. This one is highly recommended. 

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