Charley's War: 2 June-1 August 1916 [Hardcover]

This is an absolute gem; one of the underrated classics of British comics.

This is a powerful, moving and sometimes archly funny series concerning the adventures of Charley Bourne, a naive and not too bright 16-year old Cockney lad, who lies about his age to join the army who arrives in France a few weeks before the first day on the Somme. This volume contains the opening episodes in a series that ran to nearly 300 episodes and rarely dropped the pace or the story-telling power.

If you remember the series from your youth, it will not disappoint. It retains all of its old powers to entertain as well as shock, and stands up very well to the test of time to more cynical, adult eye. The beauty of it, is that it didn't condescend to its original audience (which would have been 8-13 year olds). If you are reading this for the first time, then I am sure you will find it rivetting. Each frame is packed with information and details. It is often sly and subversive, especially when the genre was filled with a diet of gung-ho war stories of the Boys' Own variety. It gave a pretty authentic sense of what the war must have been like as a soldier.

It is filled with mordant humour, but also some quite exceptionally poignant scenes. What lifts this story out of the mundane or the worthy is a humanity. You care about Charley and his mates. They feel real, their characters develop, there surroundings feel authentic. Charley is not always very heroic (and more inclined to bitterness and apathy as the story develops), though he has the decency and humanity that is lacking in the war itself.

There is a lot of mordant and bleak humour - a soldier dies in a shellhole next to a skeleton, and if you look carefully the artist has put in an open and discarded Fray Bentos bully beef tin, no doubt chucked over the lip of the nearby trench by a comrade.

A corpse's arm sticks out of a trench side offering the Charley a `landmark' to help them navigate home. During trench repairs, another character complains that this is no kind of life `even the earthworms have snuffed it' under the intense shelling, holding up a lifeless worm as evidence, moments before they unearth a corpse.

In a much later story, a character brutally finishes off a wounded German because he looks like his old school teacher and he adds, he didn't like his school teacher much.

The story throws up unusual aspects of the war. It dealt with the tunnelling under Messines years before it becames more widely known through Sebastian Faulks's BIRDSONG. It also dealt with the British Army mutiny at Etaples a good two years before Paul McGann played Toplis in the BBC television's `THE MONOCLED MUTINEER'. More surprisingly for a war story in a boys comic, it offered long periods of inaction and boredom, and a period on leave at home (though this did involve a neat double-narrative that dealt with a deserter and the French battle of Verdun). The action was often brief, bloody and intense, which seemed to mirror the reality of the war in which two weeks of the year might be `in battle'. The writers would think nothing of devoting 3-pages to a mind-numbing fatigue of some kind, a scrounge for firewood in the dead of winter, an adventure pointing out the absurdities of army bureaucracy in which nothing can be obtained unless you have a `chit', a route march, delousing, or a game of the illegal gambling game `Crown and Anchor'. There was one episode where much of it is spoken in `backslang' to confound a particularly jobsworth NCO (backslang: a street slang that was common to East End and South London traders for years). But it was always engaging and surprisingly sophisticated.

This is loving drawn and wonderfully written by two collaborators at the height of their powers. The final compliment came from some of the old soldiers who regularly wrote into the comic after their grandsons had shown them the strip, and commented on its authenticity.

I sincerely hope that Titan keep going with the series. It gets even better. It also deserves not to be stuck away under the rather po-faced and pseudo-serious `graphic novels' section. It is far richer than that.

Charley's War was quite simply THE comic strip for me as a small boy. Battle comic would regularly pop through the family letter box in the days of yore and I would race downstairs to eagerly catch up on the various characters that then dominated my world.
Charley's War left an indelible mark on me whilst I was growing up, the strip was illustrated by an artist quite beyond this sphere, the legendary Joe Colquhoun R.I.P. and scripted by the equally talented Pat Mills.
Charley and his fellow Tommies burst off the page, the mud, the bombs, the mustard gas were so real that it seemed you were there, surely a comic, especially a British comic could not have the emotional power to do this?
These men elevated the standard and quality of a media that had previously only dealt in single dimensional one man armies,plastic heroes and downright fantastical piffle. A mere 12pence comic printed on cheap paper surely had no place or indeed right to conjure up such a raw,emotional and graphic image of a horribly obscene war that would forever colour my young mind did it??
Left in the hands of anyone else that would probably have been the case but in the hands of Colquhoun and Mills the spotty faced oiks (me and others like me) got about as close to the festering boil of World War One as was conceivable in the new age of the 1980's.
These two gentlemen of the dying art were most definately not sensationalists cashing in on other peoples misery to make a few quid.Indeed Pat Mills vigourously researched his subject matter, and Joe Colquhoun would devote all his creative zeal to bringing Charley and co alive, often turning down other assignments that would have increased his wages to create the believable story world. For these two men it was more important to represent the atrocity of war in the most real way possible.A new level in comics had been attained, surely nothing could be the same again?
For real read, deserters shot by firing squads,read tackling the class divide between Private and Officer, read rats and horses wearing gasmarks, read the emotional frailty of many of the young men and indeed boys who fought the war.Boys war comics were supposed to be full of gung ho, up and at 'em, home in time for tea thrills and spills. There was no place for 16 year old soldiers crying because they miss the folks back home or on the verge of breakdown having seen a comrade blown to bits in a rat infested trench was there?
Charleys War was the real deal, it could have been your Great Grandfather telling you all about it 20 years ago, indeed Battle used to receive letters from WW1 veterans praising the comic for the accuracy of the strip after their grandsons had shown them, it was praise indeed.
As the years passed I found new thrills in life but the memory of Charley's War stayed with me, years after my Battles were thrown out I searched specialist stores to try and discover my lost youth and I found a few old copies, here in lay the real test; would Charley's War still do it for the 30 something now used to glossy war films and video games? So many things you remember as a callow youth never seem nearly as great with the passing of years, could Charley's War buck this depressing trend?
The answer was a resounding yes it could, in fact it was better because now I understood it all more and it seemed more real.
When I found out that this superb book was to be released it exited me tremendously. Charley really deserves the platform of high art that he now occupies, Titan Books have taken a lost treasure and preserved it anew.
This book is the most awesome work you will experience for years, do yourself a big favour and buy it.

This book is more than just a comic strip about World War One - the writing is superb and amazingly well researched and the art work brings the whole story to life.
If you have any interest in WW1 buy it, if you have no interest in WW1 buy it anyway as you soon will have after reading it.