Today on the site:
Longtime cartoonist Sam Glanzman has passed away at age of 93. Here is our obituary. He was best known for one of my favorite comic books of the 1960s, Kona, and various war comics for DC, most prominently his U.S.S. Stevens series of stories. His autobiographical graphic novel, A Sailor's Story, was released in 1987 and remains beloved by many. Mark Evanier remembers him here. There is a gofundme campaign to defray his medical costs here.
Here's an excerpt from my text on Glanzman and Kona for my book, Art in Time.
Ostensibly the story of a family—Dr. Henry Dodd, his daughter, Mary, and her two children—who are marooned on a fantastic island, Glanzman turned the title into a study of the white-haired Kona, a somewhat anguished and highly moral Neanderthal. Working first with writer Segal, then with legendary Harry Smith-collaborator, the beatnik Lower East Side Rabbi Lionel Ziprin, and then with his editor, the artist L. B. Cole (who also edited John Stanley’s Tales from the Tomb), Glanzman created visceral, gripping stories of near constant danger marked by Kona’s attempts to protect the Dodds from the mythical beasts that rule the island. Glanzman created pages, he noted, “that would hold the reader’s eye as single compositions; I didn’t want the reader to ever glance off the page.” This translated into page designs that usually neglected a panel grid in favor of panels or scenarios inset in larger drawings. Glanzman’s figures are in constant motion, running, fighting, falling—there is hardly room for a reader to take a breath. Working from “stick figure” pencils, Glanzman rendered his illustrations mostly in ink, which further increased the urgency of the imagery. Glanzman’s dialogue here and in his later war stories is marked by lyrical passages such as “Nobody wins wars . . . like these!” and “What guarantee do we have that to the animal kingdom . . . ‘Man’ is not regarded as the most hideous of all forms? The most bestial?” This pulp philosophizing in concert with frequent full-page drawings amplifies the drama, making the action and danger palpable. With Kona, Glanzman imbued real life into a hackneyed genre, and gave comics an unforgettable protagonist.
And still more:
This is a good piece of writing about Gengoroh Tagame.
Finally, here is a very enjoyable look at the Moomin museum in Finland.
