Alex Sarll's Reviews > U.S.S. Stevens: The Collected Stories

Short tales of life and death in America's WWII Pacific fleet from Sam Glanzman, who served on the real Stevens; these are the sort of autobiographical comics I can get behind, rather than some badly-drawn indie movie mope. Originally delivered over the course of decades, the evolution of the art is fascinating to watch, and it started out as a sort of casual Hugo Pratt so was already doing pretty well in the first place (though I should note that, not for the first time, Netgalley compression rendered the black and white period quite hard to follow so I can't really comment on those). The writing isn't always so fluent (in particular, the way the captain is always 'Lt. Comm. T.A. Rakov' would be fine on a nameplate but looks weird in captions) - overall, though, it's a damn sight better than in most old war comics. I'm reluctant to privilege first-hand experience too much in a writer, because that's one of the roads that leads to doubting Shakespeare authorship &c, and I've read plenty of eyewitness accounts that were less convincing than equivalent ventriloquisms and fictions. Still, Glanzman has both experience and talent, and that's a winning combination. For me it comes through less in the horror and pity of war stuff, or even the black humour, which you can also find in a writer who never served such as Garth Ennis (whose recommendation caused me to check this out). The really remarkable moments are the peaceful night-time seas, the pure sillinesses, the tall tales - the stuff a writer who wasn't there might easily feel they hadn't earned. Endnotes and footnotes make clear that not every incident here happened to the Stevens, but they all happened, or near enough. Which also means, of course, that there's not really an agenda. The mid-period work tends to sign off with 'Make war no more', but there are as many stories of heroism and nobility here as anger and waste. Presumably because it's easy for comfy civilians to think war is all one or the other, when the people who've been there know the story is a lot more complicated than that.