Secret History: Charleys War Intro 1

Last week’s post wrapped up the Marshal Law section of my new book, The Secret History of Comics, which also sadly turned out to be a farewell and eulogy to my co-creator on Law, Kevin O’Neill.

If you’re joining me for the first time, you can read the intro to the Secret History here, it’s available for everyone. Every subsequent post has a free preview, but the rest of it 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.

Now we come to Charley’s War, where I take you behind the scenes to show you how your favourite subversive characters were created. I kick off with an introduction that I’ve split into two halves, as it’s too long for some inboxes and I didn’t want it to end up in your Spam. So look out for Part 2!

But first, a few nice things that have been said about Charley’s War:

“My opinion, for what it's worth, is this is the best British comic I've ever read. Can't speak for foreign publications, but it may be the best - most worthwhile - comic of all time. A work of genius and compassion.”
John Wagner

“Equal parts Captain Hurricane and Wilfred Owen… Full of pathos, humour and horror… Intensely moving… Charley’s War is simply the greatest British comic ever created.”
Andrew Harrison, Word Magazine

“Charley’s War is one of the most emotionally affecting comic strips ever published.”
Dave Gibbons

“Darkly spectacular… poignant and intelligently antiwar.”
Los Angeles Times

“None (have come) even close to matching the depiction of inhumanity and misery conjured up by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s masterful Charley’s War.”
Alan Moore

Charley’s War by Pat Mills & Joe Colquhoun © Rebellion British Treasury of Comics

Introduction Part 1

Charley’s War, the comic book story of a young soldier in the Great War, beautifully illustrated by Joe Colquhoun, is still in print today, as a superb three-volume collection from Rebellion. When it first appeared in Battle comic in 1979, despite its fiercely anti-war tone, it was rarely challenged or censored. This was because it was widely accepted at that time that World War One was mass-murder, carried out by incompetent generals and politicians under the banner of patriotism.

At that time.

Charley was hugely popular with its young readers; the number one story in the comic almost for its entire run. This wants lingering on for a moment – an anti-war story was more popular amongst boys than all the other stories that often glorified war. It’s an uncomfortable fact for those who espouse traditional war comics, which is why it needs emphasising. No one really wants to look at the serious implications of this, so it is usually ignored. Charley deeply affected its readers and thus many boys from military family backgrounds told me they chose not to join the armed forces after reading it. I can’t tell you how that thrills me, especially today when PTSD and veteran suicides have reached epidemic levels.

And, having shown that anti-war stories can appeal to a mass audience, I really thought other comic writers would follow in my footsteps. They would analyse what I had done, and apply the same story and character principles to other wars such as Vietnam or the Falklands or even World War Two. This is commonplace in comics as in any media: a successful story begets other stories in the same genre. For example, Watchmen made Marshal Law possible, which, in turn, made The Boys possible. The potential was enormous.

To my huge disappointment, this normal and very commercial process never happened.

No anti-war story like Charley’s War has ever been attempted by anyone else in mainstream comics. Yes, there have been plenty of  ‘War is Hell’ stories, or even ‘War is cool’ stories, but they are emphatically not anti-war. Rather, they are in the same genre as the ‘War is Hell’ films Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. These two movies were shown to American troops to psyche them up for battle the night before they began their first invasion of Iraq. Fans have tried to excuse or explain this, but there is no excuse. It’s why I insist Charley’s War is not lumped in with the ‘War is Hell’ genre, which some have attempted to do. I always strongly disassociate myself from such efforts.

But, I told myself, there are plenty of books and films out there which have an anti-war theme. So it hardly mattered what happened in the world of comics. 

At that time

However, as the centenary of the Great War approached, this was to change dramatically.

In broad brushstrokes, there are three current viewpoints on the conflict:

1. World War One was mass-murder, carried out by incompetent generals and politicians under the banner of patriotism. The unjust conflict arose by accident, by mistake, by ‘sleepwalking’ into war.

2. World War One was a just war against an evil enemy – Germany – that had to be defeated. The Generals, although they sometimes made mistakes, were the architects of victory. The terrible loss of life was tragic but unavoidable.

3. World War One was started deliberately by Britain to crush its rival Germany.  Although Germany could have been defeated quickly, the war was deliberately prolonged for three and a half years for profits and to utterly destroy it. 

At the time of writing Charley’s War, like many people, I subscribed to the first viewpoint. The second viewpoint was the one used during the conflict and was widely denigrated in the decades that followed, reaching a critical peak in the 1960s. 

The third viewpoint was unheard of until recent years and is still barely known today, not least because of the cognitive dissonance it causes in all of us. I flinched when I first heard about it. Could this really be true? Yet the documented evidence for it is formidable and chilling and has never been challenged by establishment historians.  Of the three viewpoints, this is one that I believe is correct.

Around the millennium, in a sinister act of revisionism, the truth of the 1914 – 1918 conflict began to be quietly swept away. It was replaced instead with a simple patriotic story that Germany was the evil empire responsible, as in World War Two, and the horrendous disasters of the Somme and Ypres were actually ‘victories’.  

This was something many people had not believed since the Great War itself.

Today, after two decades of relentless and manipulative propaganda, this second viewpoint prevails. Look up most websites on the conflict today and you will see how they invariably promote World War One as a just war. The clock has been wound back to the world and the attitudes of 1914-1918.

Tragically, the revisionist historians – acting on the orders of the establishment  – have won.

How was this achieved? I’ll only go into it briefly here in so far as it affects Charley’s War.

To aid Big Brother in this Orwellian fantasy around the centenary, any film, comedy (like Blackadder Goes Forth) or drama that maintained a critical view was rarely shown on television. No more books like Butchers and Bunglers of World War by John Laffin appeared. Instead, there was a surprising flood of incredibly boring biographies – which I forced myself to read – extolling the hitherto unknown virtues of supreme Butcher and Bungler General Haig with titles like Haig, Architect of Victory  and The Good Soldier: Douglas Haig. These biographies smoothly glossed over some questionable, dubious and highly relevant aspects of Haig’s character.

For example, he often felt himself ‘helped by a power that is not my own’. Historian Denis Winter commented this was ‘an unhealthy development in a man already tending towards delusions of infallibility’. Norman Dixon, a former British officer and author of The Psychology of Military Incompetence, believed Haig was mentally unstable.

But why this need to change our past? Because, as George Orwell said, ‘Who controls the past controls the future.’ The British publishers (a handful of conglomerates) helped by acting as gatekeepers, blocking authors who dared to tell the truth about the war and General Haig.

Charley’s War also fell foul of the gatekeepers. There had been two proposed radio documentaries, a TV education programme, a Radio 4 drama pitch, plus it  was optioned by a major film production company for a TV series to be shown during the anniversary years. All came to nothing.

If you’re a revisionist, or of the revisionist persuasion, this cannot be explained away, I’m afraid. Consider the different response to Charley in France.

There, the French edition was the subject of a major exhibition of Joe’s art at the Meaux Museum of the Great War – the French equivalent of the Imperial War Museum. There were specially selected pages of Joe’s art on display at the entrance to each section of the museum. Leading members of the French media – television and newspapers – were invited to the opening and I showed them round, talking about Joe’s art. There were similar important events featuring Charley’s War at French museums on the Western Front and in Holland. The series drew special mention at Angoulême Comics Festival.

Meanwhile, in Britain, there was still … nothing.

Our Imperial War Museum was not remotely interested. Charley’s War was also disgracefully missing from Comics Unmasked, Art and Anarchy in the UK, a significant comic book exhibition at the British Library May-August 2014, even though my other stories were very much on display. That same British Library who, when I checked their bookshop at the time, did not have one book on pacifists or conscientious objectors.

I confronted the organisers as to why Charley – arguably the most influential British comic strip since Dan Dare – had been excluded. An executive from the Library, nervously avoiding making eye contact with me, said they would hope to ‘do something’ on Charley later in the centenary. They never did.

The revisionists have done a truly impressive job in carrying out their vile deception. Even the damning anti-war words of the last Great War Tommy, Harry Patch, who, embarrassingly for the state, was a pacifist, have been suppressed.  Don’t be distracted by the establishment hyenas who came sniffing round him in his final years, trying to manipulate his words to their jingoistic advantage. Here is a quote from Harry Patch the establishment didn’t feature:

‘War isn't worth one life. War is organised murder and nothing else. I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder.’ 

To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild is the only current anti-war mainstream book I’m aware of that somehow got past the gatekeepers. This may be because he showed a sympathetic side to Milner and other establishment figures, which arguably, gave the book a kind of ‘balance’. Maybe that made it easier to slip the book under the wire. If so, it’s an excellent example of subversion. I’ve made a note!

But Milner who you may ask? That would be Alfred Milner, the heir of Cecil Rhodes, and the greatest British war criminal of all. This virtually unknown eminence grise was the real leader of the British state. Milner and co. planned and started the Great War using the same techniques Blair employed to start the Iraq War. In fact, I’m sure that’s where Blair got the idea from.   

Check out E.D. Morel’s Truth and the War (available as a PDF online) for the evidence available during the war. Or the contemporary title: Prolonging the Agony by Macgregor and Docherty. Or consider the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a member of the establishment who was decorated for bravery on the Western Front, yet admitted, ‘I believe that this War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.’ So they put him in an asylum until he came to his senses.

Continued in Part 2!