Instead, there was a surprising flood of incredibly boring biographies – which I forced myself to read – extolling the hitherto unknown virtues of supreme Butcher and Bungler General Haig with titles like Haig, Architect of Victory and The Good Soldier: Douglas Haig . Snell murders an African-American Doughboy named 'Pig-Iron' that Charley has befriended and then later kills a British officer who witnessed the earlier crime. Similarly, I’ve since read the full extent of the horrors of the British occupation of Russia in 1919. At Etaples, the mutineers however managed to win the closure of the Bull Ring and eventually the whole camp.

I can’t tell you how that thrills me, especially today when PTSD and veteran suicides have reached epidemic levels. VG/VG 1st edition 2012 Titan hardback, unclipped DJ, top corners a little bumped with light edge-rubbing to jacket only, bright and unmarked.Meaux, near Paris, is the equivalent of, and has the same status as, the Imperial War Museum, only it’s more anti-war and and it’s very poignant. He shoots down several German planes but narrowly avoids death when he is shot down and his pilot Captain Morgan is killed. 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. In 2022, Pat Mills began to chart his own history of the powerful anti-war strip, which he co-created with artist Joe Colquhoun.

He never wore a poppy or acknowledged Remembrance Day; he was a sailor when Haig started all that self-aggrandising, downright evil rubbish and, to the day he died, my grandfather referred to Haig as a butcher. Most accounts I’ve read present the Tommies as noble but cipher-like figures, usually happy to lay down their lives for their country to protect freedom and democracy. Regardless of story or quality it is fair to say that the vast majority of strips followed a pattern of patriotic goodies and baddies. Please note - some interviews and feature items from older versions of the web site are still archived.Against this background, you can perhaps see why it was definitely not okay for Charley’s War to be shown to a mass audience at the British Library. Out of respect for Joe, there was no question of getting another artist to take over production, and it was felt best to simply draw it to a close. Musical machine guns were commonplace on quiet fronts…Thus in front of the 41 st division, the German gunners were known as Duckboard Dick, Fritz, Peter the Painter, Parapet Joe and Happy Harry. The story ends with him wondering how he came to become a soldier in the first place, leading into a re-run of the strip within Battle Picture Weekly until that comic folded. Exceptionally brave, loyal to his comrades and quick to defend those who are suffering bullying or injustice, Bourne makes friends and enemies in equal numbers.

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. Wattsie and Charley become best friends and manage to escape to the Dunkirk perimeter before Wattsie is seriously wounded. Mills could have written a simple story about World War One: indeed, such was the skill of Joe Colquhoun as an artist that he could have easily carried a lazy script and it still be successful to some degree.The museum had previously invited me to talk at a major exhibition of Charley’s War artwork in 2014 – with the French national media in attendance – and they kindly invited me back to do a follow up this year as their guest of honour.