Secret History: Charley's War - The Home Front
It was a Britain of shell-shocked veterans, drug addiction, unemployment, the ground-breaking anti-war film J’Accuse, Jazz, and…. revolution.
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.
If you’re joining me for the first time, you can read the intro to the Secret History here, it’s available for everyone, and so is the intro to Charley’s War.
Every subsequent post has a free preview, but if you want access to my entire rant post, you’ll need to subscribe. Full access to ALL of my Secret History of Comics as I release them every week (plus other perks, check them out), will set you back just £5 per month or £50 per year, and it helps me to continue giving you my best writing. I even have a free seven-day trial on Iconoblast, so you can try it first.
There were other action possibilities for Charley and I did consider them. There was the Irish war of Independence, for instance. But Charley as a ‘Black and Tan’ was unthinkable, it was completely out of the question. I also considered Charley as a soldier in Iraq. That would have also been risky, because Britain comes out of it very badly: our soldiers suppressed Arab and Kurd freedom after ‘Perfidious Albion’ had lied to Arab nationalists about giving them independence and then stole their oil. But I couldn’t find any books that gave me the details I needed to present an anti-war perspective, so chances are Charley would have had to remain in Britain.
It was a Britain of shell-shocked veterans, drug addiction (from government issued drugs like ‘Forced March’ as well as legal pharmaceuticals), unemployment, the ground-breaking anti-war film J’Accuse (concluding with dead soldiers rising up to accuse the terrified living cinema audience), Jazz, and…. revolution.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Iconoblast to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.