Geek Syndicate Issue 5 | Page 36

Geek Syndicate
WAR COMICS - Britain’s Lost Genre?
When I was a kid, the comics I read didn’t feature superheroes, racing around in costumes fighting crime and super-villainy. I wasn’t even that aware of them. They were occasionally on television and of course Superman was a big fixture after the success of the films, but in terms of comic books they didn’t really get a look in. Back then, I didn’t buy comics from a comic store, I bought them from my local newsagent. They had a whole shelf of them, between the stacks of newspapers on the bottom and glossy magazines in the middle shelves and they featured very different heroes from the ones we are familiar with today. Because back in seventies Britain, it seemed the War Comic for boys was king. Yet there is scant trace of it today. War stories have always played a big part in fiction, and it is fairly easy to see the attraction. Conflict narratives make for easy definition of “goodies” and “baddies” even if we wince a little at is as adults. Heroism and life and death tension are natural and unforced when your setting is a battlefield. You can dial it up to tell gritty, almost horrific stories of survival in the face of certain death and dial it down to tell action/adventure stories where no-one really gets hurt apart from an easily “othered” set of uniforms
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on the other side. War Comics pretty much had the whole spread covered.

Commando & Starblazer
Image © DC Thompson

though with a circulation well shy of its peak of a staggering 750,000 issues sold. There always seemed to be a new Commando on the shelves, with a painted front cover and dramatic title. Each story was a one-shot with new characters and new situations, which meant a certain amount of jeopardy for any given character. Its rapid publishing schedule, and one-shot nature did lead to a certain amount of plot repetition, but also meant that in the drive to keep things diverse it covered a lot more than the “usual” Second World War stories of North Africa, DDay and the Battle of Britain, so young minds got stories set in Burma, or the Atlantic Convoys, which were often overlooked in sweeping popular narratives of the war. The comic also featured stories from other wars, including the Napoleonic, Boer and the RoImage © DC Thompson

Probably the natural place to start when examining the War Comic genre is Commando. First published by DC Thompson in 1961, Commando was produced as a series of pocket-sized black and white story books and is still in print today, al-