The First World War and Comics.

 

The following is a text version of the paper I gave at the “Mars Ascending” conference in July, 2001. Copyright Esther MacCallum-Stewart. Please mail me if you wish to use any part of this document.

 

Comics and the Great War are uneasy bedfellows. The war is a much used but infrequently reinvented topic for popular fiction, presenting a fixed series of representations that conform mostly to the vision of the war poets. In clear opposition to these ideals, the comics genre is apparently obsessed by violence, its ethos one which seems in direct contradiction to the ideas commonly held about wars of the Twentieth Century.

 

Is it possible for comics to overcome the difficulties of portraying World War One? Can they provide subversive and unusual readings, or are they doomed to failure by the constraints of genre and the contemporary paradigm of warfare?

 

Comics are neglected by the Canon, considered to be the domain of adolescents and dominated by facile renditions of superheroes and spandex. Comics are regarded as a medium which typically requires little originality and poor standards of production, often relying on repetition and low quality artwork. In addition, the short format and soap opera style narrative presents few intellectual challenges to the reader. Thus run popular perceptions of comics. Deviations from this pattern, such as Spiegelman’s Pulitzer winning Maus, or the critically acclaimed Ghost World (Clowes, 1999) are excused as aberrant and unique, or are distanced from the traditional comics genre through differing sales patterns, binding and presentation.

 

Comics are direct descendants from serialised childrens papers of the early Twentieth century such as The Magnet and The Gem. Although comics already existed alongside these magazines, there is a direct correlation between falling sales in serials and their growth in popularity. When the paper shortages of the 1940s were lifted and the improvement of printing techniques allowed larger, clearer pictures to be produced, the comic began to replace the more outmoded format and presentation of the serialised story. In America, this trend was mirrored by the decline of pulp fiction stories, which had greatly helped raise the profile of comics as the two were sold in tandem on newsstands and in corner shops. Their cheapness, easy availability and appeal to a large spectrum of the population had already brought serialised magazines and pulp fiction stories to a wide audience. Increasing literacy amongst the lower classes had additionally created a greater demand for inexpensive and accessible reading materials. Pulp fiction and serials also presented another new facet; their distinctive short format. In comics this size and shape was translated into a journal comprising a twenty eight page layout. This provided a short space in which to present punchy, dynamic stories which had great success with the growing mainstream of new readers. With the obvious bonus of imagery, the war comic in particular became popular, with strong emphasis on adventure, action, and the technical detail involved in drawing the machines of war. The comics format also capitalised on this innovative use of illustration and succinct format by inventing the distinctive “splash page” introduction. This was an illustration which encompassed the entire first page and thus presented a far more vital introduction to the narrative. Another essential element in the rise of the war comic, this device highlighted large-scale drawings of combat and machinery in action

 

The highly distinctive attitudes of early Twentieth Century idealism towards warfare and combat were continued in comics long after they had been contained and diluted in other mediums. Although this severed them ideologically from many other elements of popular writing, it helped to reinforce their popularity within the genre, in particular amongst a younger audience. It is still possible to identify reflections of this idealism in many modern narratives. War discourses are frequently relocated in science fiction or fantasy settings whilst continuing to express ideas which bear strong comparison to the idealism of the World War One Generation. War comics therefore became a self-perpetuating sub-genre which has largely remained unchallenged by its peers as well as by more general critique from the Canon and popularist critics. Pre-war ideals of courage nobility and chivalry remain dominant with their narratives. This ethos is easy to reproduce and well suited to the nature of war stories. For this reason war comics have always held a specific position within the genre, involving rigidly defined narratives and art based around a formulaic, unchallenging structure.

 

British war comics from the 1940’s onwards often directly transferred ideas and stories depicted in the serials. The ethos of early twentieth century writers such as G A Henty, and the Great War writer Lt-Col F S Brereton were carried over into these comics which continued to expound the well established “public school” or pre-war honour systems. Although the War Books put pay to these sentiments in mainstream and adult writing, the extremism of these concepts in childrens fiction was still tolerated. Authors used these notions as strong grounding elements for their readers, introducing them to a series of ideas that were deliberately posited in an exaggerated capacity.  This idealism provided elements of heroism that appealed both to children, and parents who wished to engender strong understandings of morality in the younger generation. Most importantly however, there also seems to be an an underlying implication that as children reached adulthood, they would be encouraged to put aside such childish ethos, undergoing a process of disenchantment that correlated directly to the loss of innocence experienced by the generation of 1914-18.

 

High moral concepts were therefore encouraged and tolerated in childrens writing and the morality that the post war nation now largely constructed as  simplistic was still regarded as commendable in moderation. Childrens writing however, was not an arena in which simple ideas held any great weight – action and daring deeds were accompanied by a similarly inflated discourses of thought and speech, the ‘high diction’ identified by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975).

 

From these optimistic and strongly enforced ideas, a fixed war comics narrative evolved.  This contained a series of highly distinctive features which were rarely deviated from. Fig. 1 shows a typical example, and ts publication in 1986 demonstrates the tenaciousness of the war comics discourse throughout the Twentieth Century..

 

The war story had a regimented structure. Firstly, most stories were based around the Second World War. This was the most recent conflict, had ended in a conclusive victory, provided easily identifiable villains (The Nazis) and culd be easily reconstructed within the war comic story. It was a moving war that unlike the Great War had not seen extended periods of entrenchment or attrition. It was global; involving exotic and unfamiliar locations and races. Importantly to the readership, it was a recognisable war; one in which propaganda had encouraged active mobilisation of the Home Front as well as in the fields of war. And crucially, WW2 was a predominantly mechanised conflict, involving interesting types of transport and artillery (tanks, planes). Converse to this was the anticipation of casualties but the far lower death toll (for soldiers). All of these elements added potentially exciting aspects to youthful conceptions of the conflict.

 

The figure of the dominant hero was an essential component of the war story. Traditional coming of age narratives established characters who were young, naïve and brave; clearly encapsulating pre-war ideals within a distinctive figure and simultaneously providing an empathic figure for the reader. This remains a common facet of war stories in popular genres. Bernard Cornwells’ Richard Sharpe novels, the army of light in Stephen Kings The Stand, or Will Smiths’ character Steve Hiller in Independence Day all demonstrate how this understanding is still a contemporary trope for narratives of conflict. In Fig.1 Joe Two Beans assumes this role “Today Joe Two Beans must also run the Gauntlet. He is ready –”. Literally leaping out of the page across the borders of each panel into the vision of the reader, he is proportionally gigantic in comparison to the cowering Japanese; bare-chested and with arms bigger than most of the other characters’ heads. British heroes followed the standard pattern of lantern jaw and muscled physiques - often converting from soft wimps to manly-chested paragons through a scant page or so of “hard training”.

 

For the hero to win, and to win well, was seen as crucial to the success of war narrative. Clear divisions between good and evil were established quickly within each tale in order to make this achievement both conclusive and justified. The villain, especially in the form of the Nazi, was easily demonised. Compartmentalising and alienating these villains were the twin stereotypes of stupid grunt soldiers and evil “cunning” officers. Nazi’s were rarely individualised and referred to in the deliberately limiting capacities of “Fritz”, “Jerry”, “Bosche” and “Hun”. Their speech was monstrous and clumsy, restricted to “Himmel!” (surprise) “Rarg” (attack)  “Urg”, (death), “Aiiee!” (more death and some pain). Deliberately reducing speech to onomatopoeic terminology intentionally distanced the reader and invited comparison to animalism. For the chief villain and remaining itinerant evil officers the more mentally challenging but no more individualising “For you my Frent, the var iss ofer”, and “Now you vill die, Englander Scum” were also standardised utterances. By reinventing the German accent, comics writers deliberately removed ideas of realism, instead providing a eugenically inferior, fictive race, lacking both speech and solitary (imaginative) action.

 

Joe Two Beans demonstrates this technique. His description is intentionally heroic. He is an orphan. His name implies poverty (literally, he doesn’t have “two beans” to rub together). In his past, Joe was trained by Buffalo Old Man; connoting hereditary strength, wisdom from a “Guide” figure, diligence and learning. In the ensuing conflict he further imitates his grandfather by wearing the “Death Mask”. This mask is an even more potent symbol since it enables a magical transformation – from young man to warrior/slayer and back again.

 

 All of these qualities combine with his physical actions in the comic strip to depict a traditional hero figure. Two Beans fights standing straight up, whereas his enemies are bent over and below him. His attack is single-handed, individualising him. The highly unsavoury warcry “Die, Slant-Eyes!” reduces the enemy to a caricature, emphasising alienating features rather than personal characteristics. Responding to this, the Japanese soldiers act en masse, dehumanised by their group behaviour and their speech “aaagh” (twice), “aah” and “uggh”. And whereas Joes companions provide group support; “Give him some cover!”, the Japanese respond with a confused attack “Slay the American warrior!” and “Kill him!”

 

The war comic always provided the hero with loyal friends. These people provide secondary plot, and as with the device of “The Death Mask”, they also help justify the hero’s rightness in entering the field of war.  The band of followers concept was particularly useful to war narratives as stories could be located around the exploits of a small battalion or platoon..

 

 These characters strongly resembled the standard characters identified by Propp in “Morphology of the Folktale (Univ. Texas, 1968), and enabled a technique that Frank Richards had already identified through the Greyfriars Boys of The Gem. One size does not fit all, but by surrounding the hero with a small group of contempories there would always be one person with whom the reader would strongly empathise. Thus a group of friends usually contained variations of the following general figures: hero, best friend, unreliable friend (usually a coward who redeems himself), father figure (often a Home Front guide or a crusty Sergeant), mentor (another officer, usually a trusted subaltern or captain and frequently an older relative), disposable hero (angelic or morally pure figure) and comic relief (typically a working class private[1], but again often related to the central character either geographically or educationally). The hero and his band of friends usually spoke in high diction,[2] separating them from the bulk of both army and enemy by their obvious adherence by default to codes of honour and positive moral behaviour. Whilst strong emphasis was placed on the role of the individual and the actions of one against many, the elements of teamwork and cooperation posited within the group of followers were also strongly enforced.

 

Because of the ease with which this formula could be reproduced, war stories became a staple ingredient of most regular comics, providing a quick and easy option and requiring little original content to keep its readers happy. Due to the strictness of the formula involved, the war comic was published in a virtually unchanged manner until the 1990s. Within this rigid structure constructions of the Great War become highly problematised, as they involve the joint difficulties of overcoming both mythologies of the war, and the comics perception of warfare.

 

Great War stories have extreme difficulty fitting into this formalised structure. Previously established ideologies of the war myth make amalgamation particularly thorny. The war is seen as a slaughter ground for “innocent” youth, in this case the target audience. The War Myth gives the pervasive impression that the war was only fought across the Western Front: therefore constricting it not only in terms of geographic location but situating conflict within a claustrophobic domain of many entrenched together. The First World War quickly became a war of attrition; a static ongoing conflict lacking points of definite closure. Again this poses difficulties with the construction of comics narratives. Crucially, the Great War does not fit into a formula demanding heroism, militarism, and a conclusive battle at the end of day, preferably with a large and satisfying explosion to indicate a moment of definite closure.

 

Another problem was the changing perception of the war both in adult writing and culture. By the 1940s, in the aftermath of both the Second World War and the War Books Controversy, the ideals perpetrated in childrens fiction about the war were coming to be regarded as highly unsavoury. This was especially true of narratives concerning WW1; although serials such as Hammertons The Great War I Was There! Were still in circulation until 1939, the second war put pay to the popularist understandings which encouraged positive visions of the conflict. From this point onwards the coda of the war poets became dominant. Now the common understanding of the Great War has become an almost singular vision, the ethos of which war mythology is described precisely by Hynes in A War Imagined

 

A brief sketch of the collective narrative of significance would go something like this: a generation of innocent young men, their heads full of high abstracts like Honour, Glory and England went off to war to make the world safe for democracy. They were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid generals. Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them. They rejected the values of the society that had sent them to war, and in doing so separated their own generation from the past and from their cultural inheritance.

 

Deviations from this sacrosanct myth are now regarded by the Canon as offensive and in poor taste, arguably providing an extremely restricted forum for exploration of the war in contemporary writing. The ideas inherent within the war comics discourse therefore directly contradict this perception, posing grave problems for anyone considering involving the Great War within these standardised tales of action and adventure.

 

A typical example of how the First World War struggles to fit into the war comic structure comes from Fig 2. The Mill (Victor, 1968).The story immediately removes the main character from the Front line and therefore avoids static entrenchment. Bill Borden is left behind in the retreat from Mons, and is deliberately standing clumsy and motionless in the first panel whilst the other soldiers move around him. His passive stance is emphasised by the movement away from the battlefield – the action moves from right to left, back towards the reader rather than onwards into the strip and distant explosions (top right). Bill is introduced a harmless character, a bootless clerk who has a gun physically forced into his hands. His speech and the openness of his expression connote simplicity and naivety. These elements all bring an unusual level of containment to the war story not seen in WW2 stories. Bill is portrayed as representative of the average Tommy, yet his description is intentionally harmless and stupid. This idea continues throughout the story, as Bill meets a wounded Scottish soldier (“Jock”) and they hide together in the nominal mill to avoid detection by the Germans. When they are discovered, it is made clear through both the discovery and subsequent attempts to capture and kill the British soldiers that the Germans are unsporting, cowardly and devious. They repeatedly attack the wounded, bootless twosome without success, eventually resorting to a stealth raid from an “innocent haycart”. Despite this they are no match for the British; “three shots ring out” and the Germans fall dead.

 

A common motif with Great War stories, is their use of WW2 in direct counterpoint to the events unfolding in the narrative. Stories such as To The Death (Commando, #2304, 1989), False Heroes (ibid, #2432, 1990) and Bad Blood (ibid, #2649, 1993), all use a two part formula which relies on comparison of the two wars “What they (two friends) didn’t know was that a very odd chain of coincidences bound them together which went back to the First World War” (Bad Blood: 4). Second World War scenarios are often transposed to the Great War using father/son synchronicity. This transposition demonstrates similar attempts to justify human actions as happened The Mill. The ideas of repetition; either in upholding family honour or unintentionally replicating actions, is used to displace aspects of killing seen as commonplace in Second World War stories. Whereas The Mill made its characters retreat from war, reminiscence and flashbacks are ascribed the hindsight of retrospection. For example, False Heroes begins with two men discussing their parts in each war, their actions immediately contained by the following conversation:

 

Rene: Two plates [plaques on the village war memorial] and two wars, Alec. Let us hope we shall never see another again.

Alec: I heartily agree with that, Rene. Let us hope peace is here to stay this time. (4)

 

The authors have clearly tried to enable the more traditional types of war story – the Great War foreshadowing the actions of the younger character rather than taking centre stage in the narrative. The difficult ideas surrounding young men going to war (especially the commonly perception of the First World War where the myth informs us that ALL the young men died and became The Lost Generation ™), are justified as both traditional and filial, and if their elders were ideologically mistaken when they enlisted in 1914, this is remedied by acts of closure within the Second World War narrative.

 

Both displacement and hindsight avoid the most obvious problem of Great War stories: the trenches. The trenches were the most problematic area for comics writers, and in the handful involving the First World War, trench warfare is exceptionally unusual. Fig. 3 shows an extremely rare example of this. 

 

The trenches are a difficult area to draw. They are dark and muddy, requiring  large quantities of inking per page. They are small and cramped, making individual action difficult to draw. Most importantly however, they are static. In a normal war comic, killing is immediately removed from the readers’ sight as the action moves away from it. This cannot happen in the trenches. Logistically it is simply not possible, and by illustrating this situation the reader is also exposed to a far higher level of moral questioning, forced to confront the consequences of what was hitherto portrayed as an adventurous and noble situation.

 

Flames of War (Commando, 1986), shows extreme discomfort with the proximity to death and killing enforced by the trenches. The first technique is the lengthy discussion of weaponry “A clubs better’n a bayonet/I prefer my revolver”. In this case the visceral bayonet is discarded in favour of a club – a blunt weapon less likely to actually kill. The preferred weapon overall is the revolver, in this case a gentlemans (officers) ballistic that connotes a quick and relatively painless death. This discussion is incredibly clumsy, interrupting the narration before conflict happens. When it does, both the fight (top panel, bottom left) and the grenade thrown into the trench (second panel) result in confusion. The fight is ethereally drawn – there is no sense of physical contact or clear outcome. The bottom panel is particularly astonishing, instantly converting the destroyed soldiers into amorphous speedlines and flying paraphernalia. All bodies immediately disappear, suggested only by the helmet thrown clear.

 

The extract demonstrates both intense anxiety with depictions of trench warfare and the ways in which comics deliberately shut down avenues of ethical investigation. The concept of murder is artistically removed and verbally sanctified; the author and artist spend little time on the action and employ highly contrived devices, enabling the protagonists to move away from the scene of conflict both actually and aesthetically. This containment is almost automatically deployed, demonstrating how difficult war comics writers find depicting the Great War without considering the subsequent cultural reconstructions. This is a factor they need pay scant regard to within their usual domain the Second World War. Great War stories in general therefore suffer a series of self imposed restrictions including displacement (both geographical and historical), the separation of individual heroes, support groups of peers who morally enforce the actions of the hero, a reversion to high diction (Victor identifies itself as “The Top Boy’s Paper for War, Sport and Adventure”, suggesting the three aspects are synonymous) and an overall tendency to subsume the war within discourses of later conflict, especially WW2. Overall, these motifs demonstrate intense difficulty and discomfort in presenting stories about the First World War.

 

Although war comics have traditionally used tightly regimented modes of production, the genre has strong potential for subversion. During the 1980s, the British industry produced several unusual, deviant readings of cultural behaviour. However, as with any medium, there is never one single discourse running through every article at one given point, and although trends in comics have lead towards darker, more politically and culturally aware interpretations, this is by no means true for every issue on sale at the same time. The majority (as with the bulk of popular discourses) follow set patterns. Comics additionally rely on a high turnover of artists, writers and inkers for any one title. Therefore a run of exceptionally high quality may be interrupted, replaced or subsumed by different individuals with weaker talent, or a poor grasp of what has gone before. Writers, artists and inkers do not always work together or with compatible style. Hence a good quality writer can be disappointed by the low standard of the artist illustrating their ideas, or vice versa.

 

The problematic nature of writing and illustrating First World War stories led to an understanding that they were taboo, and in an industry that feasted on positive visions of confrontation, the anti-war messages resulting from the Great War were potentially useful objectives. Whereas traditional war comics struggled to contain the Great War, several modern writers saw potential in this idea. George Pratt’s Enemy Ace (1990) is a clear example of this. Instead of confining the war to simplistic narratives, Enemy Ace sought to intellectualise the war, fully embracing the ideas of the war writers. Unfortunately it also swallowed wholesale the overwritten symbolism of the war. Because of this, it suffers from terribly earnest over-writing. The elevated tone of is problematic because it tries too hard to be politically correct about the war and the necessity of informing ignorant comics readers about “the truth™”. Although it focuses on the Great War, Pratt compares a journalist suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after Vietnam, and a dying pilot from The Great War (resurrecting the need for closure through generations). Each chapter of his graphic novel[3] is preceded by a worthy quotation from the war writers exemplifying his point, complete with sepia pen and ink sketch depicting images of horror a la Edvard Munch.

 

One of the problems with Enemy Ace is inaccuracy. It misquotes Kipling as saying “If any question why we died/Tell them, because our fathers lied” on hearing of his sons death, and it describes the Christmas Truce viewed from the air by a German pilot (strongly implied to be Richthofen). This imprecision is further confused by the overall construction of the comic, which is both visually and verbally disorientating. As fig. 4 demonstrates, the art is a blurred mass of colour from it is difficult to determine what is happening. Pratt falls into the same trap as earlier war comics by creating an amorphousness to his art which leaves the reader unsure of what they are looking at and renders the depiction of corpses and violence indistinct.  Another method is the retrospective narration of the old man, whose monologue tends to be worthy but indecipherable:

 

“The War had changed me. I would never again be the same…On that field of death and introspection…my faith in humanity was restored”

 

By reproducing the mainstream ideology of the Great War, Enemy Ace makes a brave but ultimately futile attempt to reinvent the war comic. This is compounded by its rather hectoring attitude: this is the comic to end all war comics, telling the Truth about the war, through a clever, artistic manner (not like all those other, nasty comics for violent children). It is this pretentiousness which arguably makes it fall into the same rut as it’s predecessors.

 

Happily however, there is an exception to these failures. By the 1970s, the rising popularity of science fiction prompted a crisis in the war comic, and with the release of Star Wars in 1977, British comics publishers realised that drastic action was needed to retain sales. Battle, the leading fortnightly comic, drafted in Pat Mills as their new editor to remedy this problem. Mills was a British writer who had cut his teeth at American rivals DC[4], a company who specialised in the creation of narrative-driven stories involving darker, more complex heroes (the best example of this being Batman). Mills was a Marxist, keen to upset the simplistic, sentimental notions of the British comics industry, and it is probably fair to claim that over the next ten years he was largely responsible for revolutionising narrative technique in the UK comics industry, co-founding 2000AD and co-creating its most enduring character, Judge Dredd.

 

One of his earliest stories was Charleys War, which ran in Battle from 1979-86. Spanning the First World War, it starred Charley Bourne, a working class Kitcheners volunteer. He was an extraordinary character because unlike his predecessors, he was neither exceptionally heroic nor right all the time. He was merely there. Charleys story was intentionally problematic; it was multifaceted, ideologically complex, used original and often deviant characters as its central protagonists, and discussed many issues of morality within deceptively simple storylines. Mills wanted his readers to re-evaluate their preconceptions of the war myth and standard war comic discourses, and he did this through the purposely challenging figure of Charley.

 

Mills’ partner in crime was acclaimed war artist Joe Colquhoun. He too was willing to subvert traditional techniques of comics illustration to produce a far darker vision of war. Both wanted to emphasis two major issues implicit within understandings of the Great War. The first was Class. Charleys war itself was essentially class driven; his major enemy was the quasi-aristocratic Lieutenant Snell and not the inaccessible, rarely seen German army. This in itself provided a major deviation from standard narratives towards a far more politic reading of war. The other facet was an emphasis on moral issues, both writers realising that key to this was the depiction of killing.

 

Colquhoun rigorously avoided the amorphous vagueness favoured by his contempories, opting instead for heavy inks, messy backgrounds and stark facial expressions to depict an exceptionally dark atmosphere. The synthesis between Mills’ writing and Colquhoun’s illustration can be seen in the story “Gotterdammerung” (Fig. 5) The plot involves a pacifist who is forced by Snell to detonate the Messine mines. When one fails to explode, he is shot for disobeying orders. The cover presents a similarly disturbing perspective. Not only are bodies clearly visible as a result of the explosion, but the foreground shows a man being burned alive. His speech “it is the Gotterdammerung” is not only extremely powerful, but crucially identifies the soldier as German.

 

These techniques were intentionally shocking, meant to shake the comics reader into a new appreciation of the medium. By using provocative stories with multiple perspectives, Mills was cleverly angling the reader towards reassessing their reading. He often did this through Charley himself, depicting an unreliable and often morally incorrect hero. Unlike his peers, Charley was not an innocent bystander. He had chosen to enlist and frequently used violence to achieve his objectives (albeit unwillingly). His reactions of frustration, boredom and anger to situations previously depicted by comics as heroic shed new light on the behaviour of soldiers at war. His reaction to Lonely, a shellshocked companion, is typical of this “You want your boy to be proud of you, don’t you? Why don’t you start actin’ like a man for a change?”, or a conversation to a friend “All the dead bodies round ‘ere don’t arf pong…Reckon I should’ve kept me gas mask on!” demonstrate the ways Mills continually forced the reader to evaluate what they read.

 

Shifting perspectives of this kind were extremely common within Charley’s War, Mills and Colquhoun formulating techniques that worked against the grain of traditional war comics. Multiple narratives on each page deliberately divorced the art from the writing. This technique of alienation made Charley’s War a groundbreaking comic. In Fig 6, three distinct narrations work at tangents to each other. The traditional blurb in the top left “Charley Bourne with his friends…are in the hands of a German who is intent on revenging himself on all British troops. Just as the German is about to shoot them, Charley acts with lightning speed…” is a typical war comics introduction, connoting heroism and bravery on Charleys behalf. However the art shows him disembowelling the German with a piece of barbed wire, although this is fruitless – the alarm is raised regardless. In the top centre is the most contentious aspect of this strip. This is an extract from Charleys letter home: “Tell Aunty Mabel I’ll have a word with Genral Haig when I sees him. But its funny, you never sees no genrals in the trenches”. This bears no relation to the story, and serves to highlight the unreliability of Charley, exposing him as a liar who is deliberately misleading his parents. It additionally implies that his naivety is comparable to stupidity – reversing the war comic ideal that traditionally saw this as a positive asset. Throughout the stories, Mills continued to portray Charley in this way, often ensuring that he was utterly unable to respond correctly to a situation, lacking both the initiative and the intelligence to behave in the expected heroic manner.

 

 Mills and Colquhoun used an exceptionally brave and unusual technique in doing this, one which ultimately lead to the censorship of Charleys War when it was reissued in 1986. Not only do the two authors intentionally subvert the genre, but throughout the series this was a continuous process without closure. The comic created impossible situations and irresolvable paradoxes, but unlike its predecessors, it refused to contain them.

 

The impact of distorting the vision of both the war comics and Canonical perceptions of the First World War were enormous, enabling a fresh generation of comics writers free to experiment within the genre. The late Eighties and early Nineties became a period in which the comic was dramatically reinvented. However, First World War stories still remained almost unique, and the industry itself gradually subsided into business as usual, prompted by the recurring interest in the superhero genre after films such as X-Men.  Competitors tried similar ideas such as Victors’ “Cadman The Frontline Coward”, but these all fell once again to containment and cliché. Subsequent comics such as Enemy Ace proved that even after Charleys War, narratives still fell foul of the overriding influence of the war writers. In the words of Osbert Sitwell, and despite the work of Mills and Colquhoun, it was still Very bad form/To mention the war.

 

World War One is an immensely problematic discourse for war comics, clashing with the established ideas that war and fighting are a matter of course. The moral and political implications of warfare are rarely mentioned, with readers encouraged not to question what they see but instead to enjoy notions of militarism, masculinity and nationalism. The established body of war writing refutes this, centring instead on the loss of life and innocence and a close proximity to death. Comics can only succeed in portraying WW1 successfully if they subvert both genres, and this is a monumentally difficult task. Charleys War was a genuinely original and deviant attempt to do so. Mills knew that little mainstream critical attention would focus on his comic and this enabled him to circumvent both ideologies, providing a highly subversive and darkly funny alternative. His black comedy and irreverence for the subject made the reader continually question their own attitudes to war, the reliability of narration and the nature of heroism. In this way Charley’s War stands above its medium as a highly unusual and subversive reading of the Great War, and in a genre which has now come to expect shock tactics, he is still praised for the innovative steps Charleys War took to enable this.