Battle Comic's 50th Anniversary

Warlord was an incredible and justified success for D.C. Thomson’s and that’s what led IPC to commission John Wagner and I to create Battle.

Battle’s first issue came out dated 8th March 1975. So I wrote this piece below for Battle Fans Facebook Group.

it’s great to see there’s so much interest in Battle today!

Warlord was an incredible and justified success for D.C. Thomson’s and that’s what led IPC to commission John Wagner and I to create Battle. So many things we got right and so many things we got wrong! It was a steep learning curve for everybody. And there were many surprises, not least that readers didn’t always like reality-based stories. They were often hard to second-guess. But we were so lucky to have Gerry Finley-Day and Carlos Ezquerra as key contributors and their stories undoubtedly shaped Battle. We were even luckier to have Dave Hunt as our first editor who understood what we were all trying to do and supported us all the way.

I think even in those early issues there were signs of the subversion that made Battle so different to Warlord and, ultimately, longer lasting. Thus there was Gerry’s The Bootneck Boy, a forerunner to Charley’s War. Day of the Eagle - a plot to kill Hitler, that was actually the publisher John Sanders’ original idea and which his board of directors thoroughly disapproved of. Ratpack - where criminals were portrayed as heroes.Battle always had a controversial edge - like the Bamboo Curtain story - and I believe readers sensed we were trying to be innovative and different.Providing a future platform for later amazing stories like Johnny Red and Darkie’s Mob that could never have appeared in Warlord.

D. Day Dawson wasn’t subversive but was phenomenally popular and I sometimes have the feeling that achievement makes some uncomfortable as it doesn’t fit the later, cooler image of Battle. Thus I’m not aware of anyone writing a new D. Day Dawson story. So I go out of my way to acknowledge him. Often it’s those ‘uncool’ stories (Mach One in 2000AD) that appealed the most to readers and not just for a few weeks, but much longer. It didn’t fit out own personal, cool aesthetic either - which was that Dawson was meant to be a limited series.

John and I had dreamed Dawson up together and given it to Gerry to write and he did an impressive job. But our Managing Editor insisted Dawson kept going until he lost popularity which we found really embarrassing. I still feel a little guilty about the way we all finally brought about Dawson’s demise. It wasn’t easy! And it is probably still a somewhat sensitive subject to actually relate how that was done and to name names. But Gerry wrote the last episode and I recall it was a tremendous and emotional finale to the character who was actually the mainstay of Battle.

I don’t recall the Bootneck Boy being that popular, I guess it was overshadowed by other more visual stories. But I thought the art and the premise had huge potential I didn’t mind the low-key look of the art, but maybe the readers did. It was a stone in my shoe that I constantly kept coming back to: I wanted a story about the reality of war for a teenager with some glimpses of the Home Front and a life beyond war. So I tried again on Action, and asked a war veteran to relate his youthful memoirs. He liked the idea so much he decided to write and publish it elsewhere and, of course, it never happened. Another war veteran, a paratrooper, promised me the reality of war I was after, but he was always too drunk to script it.

So I persisted and finally did Charley’s War. And now, after the shocking media blackout on anything anti-war in the centenary years and beyond, I find that persistent stone in my shoe has returned once again. It insists I write Charley's successor: Ragtime Soldier, a Scottish soldier in WW1, now on Kickstarter. For me, this is how the spirit of the innovative and subversive Battle still lives on today.

Back our Kickstarter here: