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“Charley’s War”

By | July 3rd, 2018
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How do you take as subject as grim as the trenches of World war I and translate it into the format of the weekly four-page adventure story without boring your readers to tears or making a mockery of the whole affair? You don’t, obviously. Unless you are Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun, in which case you do the impossible and create a bona fide classic.

Cover by Coquhoun
Written by Pat Mills
Illustrated by Joe Coloquhoun
Lettered by John Aldrich and Jim Campbell

THE MOST RENOWNED WAR STORY IN COMICS HISTORY RE-MASTERED TO MARK THE CENTENARY FIRST WORLD WAR. Join 16 year-old Charley Bourne as he eagerly signs up to fight on the Western front in 1916. The idealistic working class boy experiences the perilous arena of trench warfare, where every waking moment is a bitter fight for survival. As visceral, thrilling and compelling as on its debut, this intensely dramatic war story is the finest the comic book medium has ever produced. Written with acute political and historical insight by British comics legend Pat Mills, it is illustrated throughout with the breathtaking artwork of Joe Colquhoun. This first volume of Charley’s War includes Charley’s harrowing participation in one of the bloodiest encounters in human history – The Battle of the Somme.

There is something seemingly inherently ‘wrong’ about adapting a World War I story into four-page structure of the weekly British anthology story. That 1970’s model demands a level of adrenaline every week – battles, chases, excitement – but the war itself is notorious, at least in terms of public memory, as a tedious affair of people dying horribly in trenches. Killed not in some glorious battle, as if that is a real thing, but anonymously in their thousands – from poison gas, bad conditions and the stupidity of their commanding officers. I am talking here not of the real war, something I am not familiar enough with to make a judgement, but of the version that has been shaped in public consciousness, by poets and writers and film makers, as the bad war which should not be glorified in any way.

What is demanded, in contest between the genre and the subject, is a very fine balancing act. One which the creators, writer Pat Mills, artist Joe Colquhoun and letterers by John Aldrich and Jim Campbell, pull-of enviously. This a very readable comic-book, full of exciting moments and forward moving momentum, but it never becomes a ‘joyful’ story. For Pat Mills the villains are not the Germans on the other side of the lines, the ignorant citizens back home or even the elitist officers, though they get the most obvious contempt from the class-conscious narrative; rather, it is the whole social super-structure that led to the situation, that sends people to die in their hundreds of thousands.

This not to say that there isn’t a degree of cartoonish exaggeration is character description. The format demands it, there are only four pages at the time and the creators need to re-introduce the characters and the concept anew every week, which means the characters must be compressible at a glance. And so lieutenant Snell is the very symbol of the aristocratic officer who would throw the common soldiers unto their death just to make himself look better, while sergeant Tozer looks like every stereotype of the old British sergeant brought into cartoon existence – everything from the barrel chest to the booming voice to the moustache. It’s characterization, and plotting, by shortcut.

This is not a bad thing, mind, this is simply how things were done. It also allows the book to move with machine-like efficiency: despite being designed for a weekly read I found it easy to go through this massive edition (clocking at over 300 story pages and being the first of three). Even the repetitive text boxes, reminding you in every chapter who Charley is, who are his mates in this storyline and what sort of trouble he is in this time, develop a sort of poetic cadence as we go deeper into the story. In the first third, in particular, there is a grim countdown to the Somme offensive by caption boxes – with the soldiers completely unaware of bad it is going to get.

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Joe Colquhoun’s art feels just right for this type of story: his front figures do have something of the cartoony about them, but he never crosses the line that turns them into a figures of fun; in the theatricality of their gestures they sometimes remind of Will Eisner – exaggerated but always human. The shot of Charley holding on to the remains of a dear friend as he gazes into the nothingness is as a powerful depiction of the thousand-yard stare as any you care to name. His battle scenes, or slaughter scenes if we are being honest, on the other hand are brutally detailed, busy without ever sacrificing the clarity of a master storyteller. Whether depicting the last cavalry charge or the first appearance of tanks on the battlefield he gives every page a hundred percent.

Lettering, on the other hand, is problematic. It’s provided by the able Jim Campbell, one my favorites of this current generation of letters, working from the originals by John Aldrich, and while my usual policy is ‘leaving the work as is’ there is one place in which I must draw a line: stop with the cursive fonts. Just stop it. not “ifs” or “butts” allowed. For readers born in English-speaking countries this might be comfortable, though I’ve heard grumbles from these types of readers as well, but if you (like me and my friends) didn’t grow up with this form of writing deciphering it becomes a chore. If you want to showcase a personal touch, the sense of a faltering human hand, in your fonts it’s possible to do so without alienating a large chunk of your readers.

The first third of the book is full of letters, written to and from Charley, which are meant to provide emotional contrast to the images on the page – as the people back home are unaware of the grimness of front-line life – but most of it was simply lost to me. I got the rhythm of the words but not their full meaning. I will compliment Joe Colquhoun’s ability as a storyteller: even if the text was sometimes opaque the plot and emotions on the page always remained clear.

Other than the lettering issue, “Charley’s War” has aged surprisingly well. It is definitely ‘of its time,’ lacking some of the more transcendental elements that characterize much of Mills’ later work in the fields of fantasy and science fiction, but it is not a criticism: this is a work that is both grounded and entertaining, and with the illustrative power of Joe Colquhoun the comics becomes a full-on snapshot of remembrance, an act of memory.


Tom Shapira

Writes for Multiversity, Sequart and Alilon. Author - "Curing the Postmodern Blues." Israel's number 1 comics critic. Number 347 globally. he / him.

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