Secret History: Charley's War 2 - The Somme

Welcome to my Secret History of Comics: my new book that I am serialising on Substack. 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.

Every subsequent post has a free preview, but the full post is for paying subscribers only, so if you’d like full access to ALL of my Secret History of Comics as I release it every week (plus other benefits, check them out), please consider subscribing: it’s £5 per month or £50 per year, and it helps me to continue giving you my best writing. I’m offering a free seven-day trial on Iconoblast, so you can try it first.

Before we get into it, I’ve actually got a small selection of signed copies of the Titan edition of Charley’s War for sale over on my Gumroad store. They’re not mint condition as they’ve been on my shelves and in boxes for a few years, so the covers have the odd scuff or scratch, but the interior pages are in good nick.

The remaining volumes of Charley’s War available on my store

The Somme

Charley as a not-very-bright, underage soldier was an obvious choice for hero. It’s an archetype for a protagonist of the Great War with many real-life equivalents. Victor Sylvester is a typical case in point.  ‘Although he was only “fourteen and nine months” he ran away to join the British Army and by the age of fifteen he was fighting on the Western Front.’ Making Charley unquestioning and patriotic ensured there was no polemic that might put off the more jingoistic reader, but there still needed to be a critical voice and that came in the form of his best mate Ginger, brilliantly rendered by Joe. Who was Ginger based on? I imagine partly on me. At school and until I was well into my thirties, my friends knew me as ‘Ginger’ because of my carrot coloured hair.

Smith 70, the voluble machine gunner, was based on my 2000AD art supremo Doug Church. Sergeant Old Bill Tozer and Lieutenant Thomas drew on the various archetypes described in the books I was reading and they were once again superbly visualised by Joe. 

Lieutenant Snell

Lieutenant Snell was rather more complex. He, too, was an archetype, even a stereotype, but I’ve always felt there was someone more behind him. Someone I couldn’t quite reach. It’s a nagging thought that persists to this day. At first, I thought he may have been inspired by Roger Ditchley, the villain of The Fosdyke Saga cartoon strip by Bill Tidy in the Daily Mirror. They even have a certain resemblance…

The great Fosdyke Sage by Bill Tidy

Growing up in the 1960s, my world seemed full of ex-army and RAF officer-types, ‘cads’ and ‘bounders’, phonies all, shamelessly trading on their supposedly glorious wartime careers.