Welcome to my Secret History of Comics: my new book serialised on Substack. The first section was on Marshal Law: now it’s all about Charley’s War.
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Last week I talked about the censorship of anti-war sentiment during the centenary years.
Now I want to celebrate the successes of anti-war creators during the centenary. The projects that did slip under the wire. These are just my personal recollections, so I may have missed a few, in which case my apologies that your work is not included. I know the Bristol Radical History Group would have run some great events during the centenary.
CHARLEY’S WAR EXHIBITION
Plymouth University and Peninsular Arts. 4th to 14th November 2014. Curated by Simon Topping. Included 36 facsimiles of Joe’s art pages. Key scenes with commentaries. There would have been other exhibitions of Joe’s art at museums, like the tank museum in Dorset, but this was the only event I was told about and attended.
TALKS
Never Again! World War I in Cartoon and Comic art. I gave a talk at the Cartoon Museum in 2014. I also interviewed Tardi and Joe Sacco at other events.
Joe Sacco did an amazing 24-foot extendible landscape book, The Great War – The First Day of the Battle of the Somme (Jonathan Cape 2013) – so impressive it featured on the Paris Metro (not the London Underground, of course). Joe had grown up in Malta where he’d seen CW in Battle. He told me:
‘What you created was pretty amazing - his drawing was so intimidating that [...] I didn't even look at it when I was drawing Battle of the Somme. I actually banned myself from looking at it! I thought I'm not gonna look at his work - because it's very difficult to look at someone who can draw as well as he did, when you're working on the same sort of thing.’
Great War Dundee Exhibition. September 2019. V&A Dundee. This was a general exhibition of Dundee’s experience of the war. Alongside other creators, academics and historians, I gave a talk to launch Ragtime Soldier comic. I invited Jim MacGregor, one half of the distinguished author team Docherty & Macgregor, of two ground-breaking anti-war books (see below). There were several key historians present, too. As Jim pointed out to me, everyone at the event was discussing important and vivid personal recollections of the war.
But no one was asking… why?
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