Border Worlds!

I am a huge Don Simpson fan. Like most fans of my vintage, I fell in love with his potent storytelling in the pages of Megaton Man from Kitchen Sink. Megaton Man was a spoof of superheroes, one of many and arguably the finest and certainly the most visceral. But there was more in Simpson's quiver than superheroes and he proved that with his next project dubbed Border Worlds. 

Border Worlds debuted in issues of Megaton Man and gets a mention on two covers of the four issues in which the color series appeared. The chasm between the mockish humor of Megaton Man and the dark grimness of Border Worlds is startling, even when the pages were in color. Border Worlds was more serious of course but drew its essence from both the rugged science fiction movies of the time such as Alien and vintage film noir epics such as Casablanca. 

The first issue of Border Worlds is titled "Living in a Space Suit" and points to one of Simpson's greater themes or at least tropes for the series, to distinguish between the rugged protective exterior of a space suit and the fluid erotic lines of a woman's naked skin. That woman is Jenny Woodlore. Jenny came to the space station /city called Chrysalis when she needed to start her life over. Her brother had changed his name to Skylore (again pointing to a contrast in attitudes) and awaited her arrival to help him with his space trucking operation. Jenny finds the business in a shambles with some of her own money having been plowed into the operation. She takes control and using the single asset the team has, a space hotrod previously owned by a presumed dead outlaw named Rory Smash, she begins to try and eke out a living. 

There's a ton of intrigue and politics as this rough and tumble city balanced between two planets is a portal to even more distant reaches of space where folks hope to find a way forward. The switch to black and white (a common thing in the late 80's) is ideal for Border Worlds. It's a series which never should be presented in color, just like vintage film noir movies of decades past. There's no value in color. 

Some of the politics involves a man named Beecher, an old fellow who had designed Chrysalis fifty years previously. Jenny shares his bed and finds comfort in it, if not passion. Beecher is a genius who is bitter he's not done more. We then learn that the space platform is beginning to wobble and will sooner than later fall from its precarious orbit to be utterly destroyed. 

Meanwhile two fugitives from Earth arrive on the city and they carry an enormous secret. A brother and sister, they have information from a long-forgotten space probe that the government wants to turn into ghastly weapons. The run to protect that secret and enlist Jenny and her gang to help them find safe have. 

Meanwhile Beecher's pleas to the city's leaders fall on deaf ears, not unlike a certain Jor-El long ago on another outer space world. The hedonist Beecher is then put under pressure, as the powers assume he's trying to get powers and not save their asses. 

Jenny and her refugees are hiding inside the bowels of the city and find a culture there, a culture rife with secrets. Jenny is ever more at a loss to explain how she's come to be involved with all this stuff, but her instincts seem to say to press ahead. 

The regular series comes to an end in an unsatisfactory way, with our fugitives still on the loose and pursed. There are other characters with other secrets and motivations and a certain Rory Smash might just be as dead previously imagined. 

A one-shot tale titled Border Worlds: Marooned advances the tale and gets Jenny out of the interior of the space city, but no closer to finding anything remotely resembling satisfaction or peace. 

This collected edition from Dover Books collects all of these issues together in a handsome hardcover volume. We get another newer chapter by Simpson which moves the story forward and establishes a bit of equilibrium for the reader. This volume is labeled "Book One". We are treated to an introduction by Simpson and a typically thoughtful afterword by Stephen Bissette. Not changes are made to the series, save apparently cut out one rather graphic sex scene. Simpson was moving into more erotic work as Border Worlds was coming to an end and that's reflected in this single sequence. Will there be more Border Worlds? I don't know, but I rather doubt it. Simpson's art style has changed greatly over the years and frankly is not well suited to a noir story anymore. But we have this gem, a thoughtful bit of comic book making from a time when such things were ripening all over. 

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Sam Glanzman's Attu!

Attu is another intriguing collection from the great Sam Glanzman by Dover Books. The series was originally published by 4Winds Publishing, an imprint operated by comic artist Tim Truman. Truman is an artist clearly inspired by the work of Joe Kubert and Glanzman himself and opened the door for his mentor to do something different.

(Concept sketches for Attu project appearing Amazing Heroes)

The story is a science fiction and action yarn about a caveman who confronts not only the obligatory dinosaurs but the equally impossible aliens.

I never picked up either of the two volumes from 4 Winds when they emerged in 1989 and 1990.

But somehow or other, I did get hold of Fantastic Worlds #1 and #2 which have additional Attu stories by Glanzman. Doubtless I bought them at the time because of Glanzman even though neither issue features the celebrated artist on the cover. His character is cover-featured on the debut issue, but the art is by Steve Busti and Al Williamson.

Rich Buckler and Joe Sinnott create a knock-out for the second and final issue of the run but it has nothing to do with Glanzman's creation.

Attu the Collected Volumes gathers together (according to the solicitation) the two published volumes of the story as well as an unpublished third volume.

(Rejected cover for the Attu volume)

In an interview Glanzman suggested there was yet another volume but no mention of it in the edition from Dover.

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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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U.S.S. Stevens - The Collected Stories!

In World War I this observation was made about the nature of war -- "Months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror." No fictional work I've come across communicated that notion more effectively than Sam Glanzman's remarkable tales of U.S.S. Stevens, a destroyer class warship in the Pacific during World War II. Glanzman served aboard the U.S.S. Stevens and in incisive but powerful four-page vignettes paints a picture of men making the best of life on board a ship and dealing with the vagaries of life as well the constant threat to life and limb. 

Above is a photo of the U.S.S. Stevens, the actual ship as plows though the ocean waters. The ship was decommissioned and scrapped in the early 70's at about the same time that Glanzman highly personal tales of the men of that vessel began to appear in the pages of various DC war comics such as Our Army at War, Our Fighting Forces, Star Spangled War Stories, G.I. Combat, and even Weird War Tales, among others. The series continued in black and white in slightly longer form in Marvel's Savage Tales and many years later in the Joe Kubert Presents mini-series. 

In all the time the series ran for DC for most of the 70's it never rated a cover appearance, though clearly it was a series well regarded by fans and pros alike. Joe Kubert seems to have been especially fond of it and even decided to use Glanzman's roughs as opposed to his more polished fully-inked work because to his mind those pages had more power. The ship did appear on an issue of Dell's Combat though as illustrated by Glanzman some years before he the series for DC. 

These are clearly exceedingly personal tales for Sam Glanzman, about men he knew or knew of. In the collection of these stories from Dover Books there is an amazing amount of background material on Glanzman and a very detailed set of notes about each of the stories and the sources. The earlier stories work best for me, both in their compact size at four or sometimes five pages and they are more personal snapshots of life aboard a ship in time of war. Later Glanzman tries to cover more of the broader nature of the war and while informative lacks the personal power of those intimate tales of men in wartime.

On this day when we take a moment to remember the Americans who were slain during the attacks on Pearl Harbor, it's this volume which showcases the individual stories of men who waged war against an enemy and as often as not against some aspect of themselves that serves to memorialize them best. They weren't suckers and losers as some have suggested in the past, but American service men who put country above their personal desire and needs. They were patriots. 

More about the U.S.S. Stevens tomorrow. 

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The U.S.S. Stevens Docks!

(First Appearance of U.S.S. Stevens on a comic book cover.)

Dover Books has released a truly significant comic book volume,  U.S.S. Stevens The Collected Stories by Sam Glanzman.

These are sobering tales of war from the perspective of sailors during World War II. This tome arrived at my house via the U.S. Postal Service (thanks be to the Postal Service) and it's awesome. A hardback book with four hundred or so beautiful pages of Glanzman artwork. At ninety plus years of age, Sam Glanzman is a living legend in the comic book field (I've adored his work since first finding it in the pages of Charlton's Hercules at the tender age of ten) and it's grand to see his truly important work find a more permanent place for readers of fine comics to enjoy for years to come. Dover Books and the folks involved with this book such as Drew Ford and Jon B. Cooke are to be congratulated. Thanks gentlemen for making this possible and thanks to Sam Glanzman for producing something of lasting significance in a field which all too often is littered with disposable trash.

And don't forget to pick up this lush trade, A Sailor's Story which gathers the two U.S.S. Stevens graphic novels Glanzman produced for Marvel. 

Get these books!!!

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The Times Of Attu!

Attu is another intriguing collection from the great Sam Glanzman by Dover Books. The series was originally published by 4Winds Publishing, an imprint operated by comic artist Tim Truman. Truman is an artist clearly inspired by the work of Joe Kubert and Glanzman himself and opened the door for his mentor to do something different.

Concept sketches for Attu project appearing Amazing Heroes

The story is a science fiction and action yarn about a caveman who confronts not only the obligatory dinosaurs but the equally impossible aliens.

I never picked up either of the two volumes from 4 Winds when they emerged in 1989 and 1990.

But somehow I did get hold of Fantastic Worlds #1 and #2 which have more Attu stories by Glanzman. Doubtless I bought them at the time because of Glanzman even though neither has the artist do the cover. His character is featured on the debut issue but the art is by Steve Busti and Al Williamson.

Rich Buckler and Joe Sinnott create a knock out for the second and final issue of the run but it has nothing to do with Glanzman's creation.

Attu is due out late this summer and gathers together (according to the solicitation) the two published volumes of the story as well as an unpublished third volume.

Rejected cover for the Attu volume

In an interview Glanzman suggested there was yet another volume but no mention of it in the upcoming edition from Dover.

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Shipping Out On The U.S.S. Stevens!

Sam Glanzman is one of  my comic book heroes. I fell under his spell with his work on Charlton's Hercules, Iron Corporal, Tarzan and more in many a Charlton comic. I looked at his Tarzan work here.

He's one of those nose-to-the-grindstone artists who has gotten too little praise in a career which surprisingly stretches all the way back to the halcyon Golden Age.

He's had new work appear as recently as last year and now at long long last his most personal work, the saga of the U.S.S. Stevens which appeared in the back pages of many a DC war comic will be collected and given the prominence its never received. These stories date back to the early 70's when Glanzman took his talents after his tenure at Charlton. With a style that evokes the best of the more famous Joe Kubert, the editor who brought him to DC. In fact Glanzman produced new stories in the series at the request of Kubert for Kubert Presents, the remarkable limited series which came out from DC just about the time that the great artist passed on.

Glanzman worked yeoman-like for years at DC then went over to Marvel at editor Larry Hama's invitation where his very personal saga became two graphic novels A Sailor's Story in 1987 and A Sailor's Story Book Two: Wind, Dreams, and Dragons. Read more about it here.

These latter two epic efforts along with an unpublished short story in the series, have already been collected by Dover Books and are now available. I just got my volume of A Sailor's Story in the mail and it looks beautiful. The earlier U.S.S. Stevens short stories have now themselves been collected, something many of us Glanzman fans never thought possible and will be available from Dover later this summer; I've already pre-ordered my copy. My reading plans for this summer have just changed amigos.

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