In what my six year old son calls ‘the olden days’aka my
childhood, (don’t laugh teenagers, he also talks about ‘the middle olden
days’ when his seventeen year old brother was little!), war was cool. We had
war films and war toys and most importantly, for me, we had war comics. Lots of
them.
Most war comics were about the Second World War and had lots
of shooting and Germans shouting, ‘Nien! Nein!’ or ‘Achtung!’. It was all good
fun but a bit samey after a while. What was not samey was Charley's War, a strip that ran in the awesome Battle Picture Weekly.
Charley’s War was
different in many, many ways. Not least was the fact that it was so blatantly
anti-war.
Reading Charley’s War it
was hard to miss the fact that being forced to live in the industrialised meat
grinder that was the Western Front was not fun times. Of course that didn’t
stop us lapping up stories about slaughter in the mud and trenches, or the
psychotic nature of some upper class English officers, or the life and times of
young Adolf Hitler, (yes, that Adolf Hitler), or mutiny in the allied army or
the nature of field punishments inflicted on conscientious objectors. In fact the series, now that I think about it, attempted to
cover the whole gambit of that awful conflict and never flinched from depicting
its ugly, vicious exploitative nature.
The series has been recently reprinted and is available from Auckland Libraries. Totaling nine volumes, (so far), these are not only an
excellent read but also quite useful as far as homework and study are
concerned.
Each volume has an excellent essay covering aspects of the war
depicted in the volume concerned and in the back there are notes by series
writer Pat Mills in which he gives useful background information about the strips and waxes lyrically about Joe
Colquhoun, artist extraordinary, who illustrated the comic from its start and
right through to its end.
- Kelly from Information Services
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