Secret History: Charley's War Origins 1

With Johnny Red, Joe went through an amazing renaissance that left us all absolutely gob-smacked. We’d never seen anything like it. The action and the detail were mesmerising.

Welcome to my Secret History of Comics: my new book that I am serialising. The first section was on Marshal Law, and now it’s all about Charley’s War.

If you’re joining me for the first time, you can read the intro to the Secret History here, it’s available for everyone, as is the intro to Charley’s War.

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Johnny Red by Tom Tully and Joe Colquhoun

D.C. Thomson’s Warlord comic was a huge hit with boys in 1974. There had never been a comic like it before. For the first time, a comic featured big exciting images and its stories were exclusively about authentic war and action. It also had a great title. It was just what the readers were looking for. There were still traditional elements in it – such as the title character who was an aristocrat, clearly inspired by the Scarlet Pimpernel, and The Wolf of Kabul, who was a once popular but now rather dated British imperialist hero. Even so, the comic was dynamic, fresh and full of energy.

So the publisher at IPC Magazines, John Sanders, asked John Wagner and I to create a rival war comic. Sanders approached us because we had a successful track record and IPC boys comics – at that time – were going down the toilet.  Most of their stories were stupid and lacking reality. Our first response may seem a little unlikely today, because we now live in an era where establishment values -– despite a ‘woke’ veneer – prevail in the media as never before. And, as far as I can see, comic writers now do what they’re told without question. 

The comic revolution is over.  

But it was very different back then. It was normal – for talented creatives, at least – to regularly challenge authority. Rebellion wasn’t a meaningless word, an affectation to sound cool, it genuinely meant rebellion. I distinctly recall John and I being taken aback at the idea of a comic which glorified war, which Warlord most certainly did. The comic didn’t even employ the ‘War is Hell’ excuse used today: rather it was ‘War is great!’ Bear in mind we were children of the 60s and a counterculture revolution that had swept the country and showed no signs of abating by the 1970s. That would come much later with Thatcher. 

So we told Sanders we were really not comfortable with producing an all-war boys comic. He suggested we just have some war stories, at least, and the rest could be general adventure tales like Victor. So that’s how Battle started. We quickly realised that if we were to compete with Warlord, we had to follow suit. As I had a wife, two children, and I mortgage, I realised I’d have to give the publisher what he wanted. I imagine John Wagner went through a similar process. That’s how the system usually works.