Samuel Joseph Glanzman (December 5, 1924 – July 12, 2017) was an American comics artist and memoirist. Glanzman is best known for his Charlton Comics series Hercules, about the mythological Greek demigod; his autobiographical war stories about his service aboard the U.S.S. Stevens for DC Comics and Marvel Comics; and the Charlton Comics Fightin' Army feature "The Lonely War of Willy Schultz", a Vietnam War-era serial about a German-American U.S. Army captain during World War II.
Biography
Early life and career
Glanzman was born on December 5, 1924, in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Florence and Gustave Glanzman. His father was Jewish and his mother Catholic. His brothers were comic-book artists D.C. (Davis Charles) Glanzman, and Louis "Lew" Glanzman, the latter of whom went on to become a fine art painter.
Glanzman ended his formal education after grade school. He entered the comics industry in late 1939, during the period historians and fans call the Golden Age of comic books, at Funnies, Inc., one of the early "packagers" that supplied comics to publishers then entering the fledgling medium. There, for Centaur Publications, he wrote two-page text stories with incidental art for Amazing-Man Comics. Later, for Harvey Comics, he created Fly-Man in the superhero anthology Spitfire Comics #1 (August 1941), writing and drawing the feature for at least two issues. He also contributed to Harvey's All-New Short Story Comics (where he published his first recorded war story); Champ Comics (stories about the superhero Human Meteor); and the radio program tie-in series Green Hornet Comics through 1943.
He served in the U.S. Navy, during World War II, stationed on the destroyer U.S.S. Stevens, and was discharged in 1946. Eschewing work in comics ("I was getting $7.50 a page for [Fly-Man], pencils, inks, story, and coloring ... I figured, 'Hell, that's not much money.'"), he began a peripatetic career doing manual labor in cabinet shops, lumber mills, and boat yards. After marrying in the 1950s, he worked at Republic Aviation in Farmingdale, New York, installing machine guns on military jets. During this time, he lived in Rockaway, Queens, and in the Long Island towns of Valley Stream and Massapequa Park.
Seeking to return to art, Glanzman did some work for the Eastern Color series Heroic Comics and New Heroic Comics in 1950, and found better-paying assignments doing children's book illustration. He may have done uncredited work for his brother Lew on a hardcover book series for children about aircraft. Work was not steady, however, and Glanzman returned to Republic Aviation.
Charlton Comics
In 1958, Glanzman began working with Pat Masulli, the executive editor of Charlton Comics, a low-paying publishing company. He specialized in stories for the war titles Attack, Battlefield Action, Fightin' Air Force, Fightin' Marines, Submarine Attack, U.S. Air Force Comics, and War at Sea, producing a large amount of authentically detailed work. In mid-1961 he switched to Dell Comics. where he worked on the anthology Combat, drew the movie adaptation Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (and the similar, though unrelated, four-issue Voyage to the Deep), and a range of titles from lost-world adventure (Kona, Monarch of Monster Isle) to heartwarming animal drama (Lad: A Dog). He occasionally still moonlighted for Charlton, using the initials "SJG" for his work on the 1962 Marco Polo movie adaptation and elsewhere.
Beginning mid-1964, Glanzman moved regularly between Charlton and Dell assignments, almost exclusively on war stories, but also on a Charlton Tarzan series. Although some sources credit him for co-creating the Charlton hardboiled detective character Sarge Steel, he stated in a 2009 interview that "The only thing I created was the "U.S.S. Stevens", "Attu" and A Sailor's Story."
During the 1960s Glanzman and writer Gill created the Charlton mythological-adventure series Hercules: Adventures of the Man-God, which would run 13 issues (Oct. 1967 - Sept. 1969), and showcased Glanzman's experimental side, where he might float Art Nouveau-bordered panels within action tableaux filled with Hieronymous Boschian nightmares.