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

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And this recent experience reminds me of how the British Library pointedly excluded Charley’s War from their major exhibition of influential British radical comics back in 2014.

The British publishers helped by acting as gatekeepers, blocking authors who dared to tell the truth about the war and General Haig. I discovered there was widespread collusion and trading between the British, French and German governments during the conflict. Mental damage in war is something that the world of comics had never before (or since) included or even hinted at.Yet in just recent years I’ve discovered that the truth was actually even more bizarre and humorous. These biographies smoothly glossed over some questionable, dubious and highly relevant aspects of Haig’s character. A conscientious objector who has been forced into the army through torture and intimidation and works as a miner alongside Charley in 1917 employed to lay explosive mines beneath the German lines. Mills’ desire to expel the myths of war in general from the minds of its young readership and his want to do justice to the terrible legacy of the Great War can only be applauded. The thing that strikes me the most reading it now is just how much it attacks the class system of the time.

In addition to depicting Charley's own experiences of the war, the comic took the risk of going off on several tangents, temporarily shifting the focus to characters in different locations and time periods. Mills added a political slant in the strip not seen in British war comics and avoided the standard heroics common in war comics generally.Never a natural-born soldier and always the first to complain, Ginger makes up for his lack of enthusiasm with his sense of humour and cunning. He wrote the first ever script of Judge Dredd and his multitude of other creations include Slaine, ABC Warriors and Nemesis the Warlock, along with more recent creatons such as Greysuit and Defoe for 2000AD, anti-superhero Marshal Law for the US market and, in France, Requiem Chevalier Vampire (with Olivier Ledroit). Morel, the journalist who exposed the truth about the Belgian Congo atrocities, was feared by the British state, because he was exposing their war crimes, so they imprisoned him and broke his health. Historian Denis Winter commented this was ‘an unhealthy development in a man already tending towards delusions of infallibility’.