Charley's War Vol. 1: Boy Soldier: The Definitive Collection: Volume 1

Product Information

A working-class London lad from a close-knit family, he enlists in the British Army in 1916, age sixteen and arrives in the trenches on the Western Front shortly before the start of the Somme Campaign. Please note - some interviews and feature items from older versions of the web site are still archived. After all, when I wrote Charley’s War, I consciously set out to subversively attack the State for its war crimes in the Great War. His fundamental decency and conscientious sense of duty are sometimes at odds with his anger at the many injustices of military life and his growing disillusionment over the conduct of the war.

Charley reluctantly helps Blue to avoid capture whilst in Britain and later encounters him again during the infamous Etaples Mutiny in 1917. Another remarked that the experience convinced him that the: “Army have no consideration for the men at all”.I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder. Crimes which – as long as they remain unacknowledged – are a dark curse on our country’s national karma, poisoning the present and the future. The sudden death of a major character like Ginger would usually be signposted by extended scenes dwelling on him before his demise.

The obvious point here is that the comic is quietly illustrating how the rules cease to apply at times of establishment crisis. The BBC, for instance, said they couldn’t show the anti-war series Monocled Mutineer because of contractual problems and costs.And so is this introduction to Charley’s War, which is long enough to split into two parts, so make sure to check out Part 1 if you missed it. Charley becomes hostile and refuses to believe it but yet the narrative that accompanied the frames confirm the story is real. Another censorship tactic – conscious or unconscious – is to allow limited opposition to the status quo. Joins the BEF in France and participates in the heavy fighting against the German Blitzkrieg and in the long and confused retreat to Dunkirk.

The first and most successful tangent was the story of 'Blue', a British soldier in the French Foreign Legion who fought with them at Verdun in 1916 before deserting and making his way back to England (where he meets Charley). Regardless of story or quality it is fair to say that the vast majority of strips followed a pattern of patriotic goodies and baddies. They’d survived the over-scaled retribution for the Mau Mau revolution (which was, admittedly horrific itself and needed a response). Whilst on their honeymoon, they receive the news that Wilf is dead, having been shot down after bringing down a German Zeppelin heavy bomber over London.Pat Mills seems to drive the point home time and time again, making the usual enemies of war comics become almost allied (British and Germans) and fingers the real enemy as the ruling classes who treated the war as some kind of sport. I remember telling my Grandmother about the Silvertown munitions factory explosion, only to be astonished when she told me she remembered all the windows in her neighbourhood being smashed by the blast.

To aid Big Brother in this Orwellian fantasy around the centenary, any film, comedy (like Blackadder Goes Forth ) or drama that maintained a critical view was rarely shown on television.

So that new generations today will believe that the Great War was a just war, that Britain was ‘the good guy’, and the generals and politicians were heroes, not the mass-murderers of our forefathers. In 2022, Pat Mills began to chart his own history of the powerful anti-war strip, which he co-created with artist Joe Colquhoun.