Charley's War: 2 June-1 August 1916 (Hardcover)

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.

Well, its finally here, after many months of badgering them and hassling them, bombarding them and straffinf them with your email demands for a reprint (or else), those poor people at Titan have finally given in, i received in the post this morning a brand spanking new copy of the new book and WOW! its brilliant.

This quality hardback edition is resplendent in black with a single poignant poppy superimposed onto one of the most famous of the photographs from WW1 (of the tommy in silhouette saying goodbye at the grave of his mate). underneath the title the cover tells us it runs from 2nd June 1916 until the 1st of August 1916 (published from the 6th of January 1979 until 28th July 1979) This means that this collection is bigger than the previous releases in the eighties, and falls only about four issues short of being both previous books combined. Some have said they imagined that the book would be just a re-release of books one and two to cash in on the interest to the website, that couldn't be more wrong, Titan have truly excelled themselves making it contain almost both the previous chapters (1 & 2), a wealth of great articles which includes Pat Mill's forward, his strip commentary, a little bit by me (a striped down stripography) and an excellent historic piece about the background to the Somme by Steve White who put this package together. that's some collection and it makes for a damn impressive book.

Mills writes a strident almost damning foreword to the story in which he acknowledges his peer's compliments on the strip but asks why no-one was influenced enough to take it and make something in its mould, with an equally subversive subtext. As a result it's 'a creative cul-de-sac' says Mills a series that 'led nowhere'.

After Pat's forward there's my modest little effort, all i can say to that is thank you to the kindness of Steve White at Titan for giving me the chance to be involved, and to Pat Mills who always has kept me informed and at the sharp end of the whole thing. It's a very strange feeling to be a part of it, after all these years..

In addition to that at the back of the book is possibly the best thing about this release; Pat Mill's strip commentary, an issue by issue explanation to the content, who, what's, wheres, etc. its a wealth of details about the story that have never been told before and a great read. Lastly Steve White's article on the Somme is highly accurate and informative and gives the new reader some background and context to the strip, which anchors it back where it should be-reality.

Many people were worried that without the original art to print from then the quality of the strip would be comprimised, im very pleased to say thats not true and the the printing is superb throughout, clear and crisp allowing Joes work to impress new generations who discover it..

As you know this website is completely independent and not owned by anyone and not part of Titan at all, but i intend to use this as an advert complete with links, flashing lights and pay now signs, why? because Titan have said that depending on the sales of this release they will continue reprinting until it 'no longer is economically viable'. If the rest are anything like this i want the entire story in my bookcase, so my advice to you charley's war fans is BUY IT !!!!

Neil Emery