Geek Syndicate Issue 5 | Page 38

Geek Syndicate
Charley’s War
Starting in 1979, Pat Mills (writer) and Joe Colquhoun (artist) produced Charley’s War, detailing World War One through the eyes of sixteen year old infantryman Charley Bourne. The first story arc is the buildup to, and experience of, the notorious First Battle of the Somme and it is striking in its brutal depiction of the horrors of war. Readers will have been used to characters dying in war comics - they are about war, after all - but the scale and senselessness depicted throughout the series gives it a powerful anti-war message that isn’t always reflected in its more “gung-ho” contemporaries. What Charley’s War does share though is a keen eye for detail. The series cuts away several times to focus on Charley’s friends or relatives engaged in other parts of the conflict, including the Battle of the Falklands and the early Royal Flying Corps. It has a keen eye for British social division of the period (yes, we’re back to Class again!), as well as a good sense of the wry, dark humour of trench life. Charley Bourne served his country right through the Great War, then spent time in the Russian Civil War before heading back to Blighty to get on with life outside the army. Mills left the comic in 1985, following which the story briefly took in the Battle of France in 1940, and eventually Colquhoun’s ill health (he died in 1987) led the strip being finished for good. as shadows of their former selves. Their contents became increasingly dominated by reprints of previous stories. Today, only Commando survives. The only comic book of my youth I can find in a local newsagents is that battlehardened survivor of the British Comics scene, 2000AD, which had its own SF war story, Rogue Trooper, published in 1981, at the height of the genre’s popularity.

The Present
I’d like to think that at least in part the decline of the war comic, with its obsession with the perceived heroics of the Second World War, mirrors a change in Britain from a country looking back at a faltering Imperial Past to a country more at ease with itself than it was in the turbulence of the seventies and eighties. In addition, the nineties were a fascinating time for superheroes, with the genre being torn down and reconstructed. New imprints like DC’s Vertigo soaked up British talent to tell tales of all sorts of avant-garde weirdness. In terms of capturing the imagination of the British youth, the United States was suddenly where it was at and the same old stories from the same old titles just didn’t seem like it was enough. However, In 2001 and 2003, Vertigo printed War Stories, from Garth Ennis, a British Writer of my generation, someone who must have grown up with the same sort of reading material that I did.

Hard Times
By the nineteen-eighties, home grown British comics were on the decline. Warlord and Victor amalgamated in 1986 and Battle merged with the re-launched Eagle in 1988. Both struggled on into the early nineteen-nineties, but

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Image © I{C, 1985