Charley's War

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Joe Colquhoun's cover to the original Titan Books collected edition.

Charley's War is a British comic strip written by Pat Mills and drawn by Joe Colquhoun. It was originally published in Battle Picture Weekly from January 1979 to October 1985

1 Publishing history
2 Publications
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Publishing history

Described by Andrew Harrison as "the greatest British comic strip ever created", Charley's War tells the story of an underage British soldier called Charley Bourne. Charley joins the British Army during World War I at the age of just 16 (having lied about his age; the recruiting officers conveniently overlook the fact that Charley gives his date of birth on his application form as 1900), and is quickly thrust into the Battle of the Somme.

The strip follows Charley's life in the trenches and his experiences during the war. Colquhoun put a meticulous level of research in to the already well-researched scripts which Mills provided. The strip rarely flinched from providing an extremely frank portrayal of the horrors of war, so much so that in some later reprintings some of the artwork was censored. Mills added a political slant in the strip not seen in British war comics and avoided the standard heroics common in war comics generally.

The strip followed Charley through to the end of the war and through into the invasion of Russia in 1919. However in January 1985, Mills quit the strip before being able to complete the story (he intended the story to end in 1933, with Charley on the dole as Hitler is made Chancellor of Germany) due to a dispute over his research budget.

Mills was replaced by Scott Goodall and the story was moved to the Second World War and became a more conventional war adventure strip. The strip eventually ended in October 1986.

[edit] Publications

Titan Books are reprinting Charley's War in 112-page hardcover anthologies. Three collections have been published so far:

Charley's War: 2 June-1 August 1916 (November 2004, ISBN 1-84023-627-2)
Charley's War: 1 August-17 October 1916 (November 2005, ISBN 1-84023-929-8)
Charley's War: 17 October, 1916-21 February, 1917 (October 2006, ISBN 1-84576-270-3)