A MARVEL GRAPHIC NOVEL
 
By Sam Glanzman (Marvel)
ISBN: 0- 87135-556-6
Sam Glanzman produced comic magic for decades in an underplayed, effective and matter-of-fact manner. For many years this hugely neglected talent has been making great narrative art without flash or dazzle, gaining fans among the cognoscenti yet largely unnoticed by the mainstream fans, but in 1987 he produced an autobiographical graphic novel that made quite a few waves.
A Sailor’s Story (ISBN: 0- 87135-298-2) captivatingly related his experiences as a young man aboard the American Destroyer U.S.S. Stevens in a no-nonsense, highly entertaining tale, and broke new ground in the progress of the graphic novel as a medium for artistic expression. It also reached a lot of buyers who wouldn’t be caught dead with a copy of Spider-Man or Conan…
This sequel returns to the Pacific at the height of World War II, and by clever use of narrative devices such as Ship’s Travel Logs incorporated into the page designs, and diagrams and cutaways as part of the text, manages to instil an even more documentary atmosphere into this wonderfully human-scale drama. This is used to create a foreboding sense of dread as the crew encounters and learns to live with the then-unknown terror weapon of suicide-pilots who would become a household name to us: Kamikaze!
Combining the folksy, informative charm of the first volume with the “hurry-up-and-wait†tension of modern warfare, and delivered in an increasingly bold and innovative graphic style, Wind, Dreams and Dragons is one of the best explorations ever produced of sea-combat as seen through the eyes of the ordinary seaman. I pray some right-thinking publisher re-releases this – and its companion predecessor – as soon as possible…
© 1989 Sam Glanzman. All Rights Reserved.