The return of Ragtime Soldier

The successor to Charley's War!

I know that last week I promised Torturer 2: fear not, it will feature next week!

I’m delighted to say that plans are now in hand for RAGTIME SOLDIER to return next year. In association with COMIC SCENE, we’re planning to do a Kickstarter for a 48-page graphic novel.

As you may know, RAGTIME SOLDIER originally appeared as an 11-page story in the Great War Dundee comic, with a cover by the late Ian Kennedy. It was drawn by Gary Welsh and Phil Vaughan and was designed as the natural successor to CHARLEY’S WAR.

Cover by Ian Kennedy

Joe Colquhoun is a hard, even impossible act to follow, but I believe Gary, Phil and myself achieved it by taking an exciting new direction, as I will go on to explain.

COMIC SCENE, Gary, Phil and Great War editor Chris Murray are all back on board and keen to make it happen.

So the idea is to add a new 37-page Ragtime Soldier story, to total 48 pages.

Ragtime Soldier is ‘the same but different’ to Charley’s War. For years, it was obvious there had to be a successor to Charley – not least because of the sinister State suppression of the truth about the Great War in the centenary years. Where even the brilliant Blackadder Goes Forth was limited in how it appeared. I’ve written often enough about this in the past, so I won’t repeat myself here.

Ragtime Soldier ticks all the Charley’s War boxes and will be a labour of love for all of us.

Gary and Phil’s art has a warm, detailed, authentic Scottish quality that is the counterpart to Joe’s depiction of cockney hero Charley.

In fact, the first element of Ragtime Soldier that makes it ‘the same but different’ is that this time, it’s Scottish.

The first story told the heartbreaking story and heroism of the Ragtime Soldier and his mates of the Dundee Black Watch at the Battle of Loos – a uniquely tragic Scottish story that needed to be told.

Those poor guys charged over the top into a hail of machine gun bullets to their battle cry of ‘Marmalade!’ (Dundee, of course, was renowned for its marmalade.) Incredible but true. Sometimes that makes me smile, other times it brings tears to my eyes.

The second story I’m intending to write will tell a similar Great War story from the Scottish and Dundee perspective.

You can be sure it will be authentically Scottish in every way. Especially the dialogue. Dundee dialect is unique, so I carefully checked and changed my ‘English’ dialogue against an on-line resource. It was then further checked and amended by Phil and Chris. And, as if that wasn’t enough, Dundonian Ian Kennedy gave it a further look over and made yet more changes into Dundee dialogue!

I lived and worked in Dundee for several years. It’s where my writing career began and, as I’ve said many times before, I regard Scotland, and Dundee in particular, as the true cultural home of UK Comics and popular culture. It lacks the ‘elitism’ that has corroded comics elsewhere. Any snobbery I may have had as a trainee young magazine journalist starting at D.C. Thomson was soon knocked out of me by making the tea, writing daily horoscopes for the Courier, and reading yards of Mills & Boon stories for possible inclusion in People’s Friend magazine.

So when I’m writing Ragtime Soldier, I’m coming home.

The second element of Ragtime Soldier that makes it different to Charley is the story construction. I always wanted to show Charley in the inter-war years of the Great Depression and the General Strike, but, dramatically, it would not have been viable in a war comic. The construction of Ragtime Soldier is different, however. It shows events after the war and relates them back to the conflict. So with the first story it shows how Winston Churchill was kicked out as Dundee’s MP and a pacifist was elected!

There will be a similar structure to the new story. Probably featuring ‘Forced March’, the Henry Wellcome drug (cocaine and caffeine) that turned many soldiers into drug addicts after the war.

We thus enter a dark and sinister post-war world, the equivalent of which can be seen in the show Peaky Blinders.

I didn’t know about Forced March ‘medicine’ when I was writing Charley. It was a carefully kept secret which has only come to light in recent years, and which Great War historians universally avoid. They have far more important things to write about. Thus I just did a quick check on The Western Front Association and it shows no reference to this drug that destroyed the lives of so many. Yet, in other respects, the WFA is a mine of information on the Great War.

Curious.

I doubt that Battle editorial would have allowed me to tell the full story of Forced March in Charley, had I known about it at the time. They were already starting to get cold feet and censor me.

So this is the crucial importance of Ragtime Soldier: it tells the stories of our forefathers that you are most unlikely to read anywhere else. Because historians do NOT want you knowing the reality of war. The deliberate, cold-blooded mass murder of a generation, a cull of the nation’s youth by the State.

Historians daren’t tell the truth. They have families and mortgages. They want their books to go on being published, and there’s now only a handful of major publishers, who ensure their books reflect official State propaganda. Because we are one of the most censored countries in the world.

Thus to quote the WFA, ‘In the last four years three new biographies of Douglas Haig have been published. Each of the works helps mark the fact that the Field Marshal is being seen not as ‘butcher and bungler’ but as a figure of historical importance and deserving of sober unemotional analysis.’

I’m sorry, but it’s hard not to be emotional whenever I think of Haig and what he did to a generation of young men.

No-one’s going to fucking read them, (I forced myself to read three Haig biographies and I was bored to tears) but that doesn’t matter. If the publishers keep calling him ‘The Chief’, ‘The Good Soldier’ and ‘Master of the Field’, maybe they think they can wipe out his true reputation as a butcher. And a bungler. Deliberately bungling, in my view – a subject I hope to explore in a future story.

This is why Ragtime Soldier is such an important project, which I hope you will support.

Forced March is just one of endless suppressed stories waiting to be told in future editions of Ragtime Soldier.

The third element of Ragtime Soldier that’s ‘the same but different’ is the villain – a real life Captain Snell: Major Pollard. You may know from my book, Pageturners, how passionate I am about Pollard. He’s featured in at least two other stories of mine. He’s the villain we love to hate. A ‘James Bond’ whose crimes were so nefarious that no historian has dared to write about him.

How so? Because whether it was working with the Black and Tans (It’s astonishing and even disturbing that Pollard wasn’t assassinated by the Squad of Michael Collins on Bloody Sunday) or starting the Spanish Civil War by rescuing Franco from exile, this real life Flashman does not make Britain look good. I suspect publishers – looking forward to their knighthoods – would have turned down any such proposal.

Artist Gary Welsh told me how he particularly enjoyed drawing Pollard.

Snell was bad, but Pollard is even worse!

So Pollard will definitely return in Forced March!

And finally there’s the music and the comedy. Those teenage boys who were murdered by Haig, were into Ragtime – big time. It was the rock and roll, the rap, the hip-hop of its day. Their parents hated it because it was ‘black music’, it was hot and sexy, so kids loved it! WW! Historians obviously find the subject boring because they rarely cover it, preferring to show young men as patriotic, characterless ciphers eager to lay down their lives for their country.

And then there’s comedy, which there will plenty of too, just like in Charley. It’s best summed up by the trench song ‘Ragtime Infantry.’ It was sung to the tune of the solemn hymn, the Church’s One Foundation, a wonderful piece of Pythonesque mockery by our ancestors. Fred Karno was the king of slapstick comedy.

We are Fred Karno's army,
The ragtime infantry.
We cannot fight, we cannot shoot,
What earthly use are we?
And when we get to Berlin
The Kaiser he will say,
Hoch, hoch! Mein Gott, what a bloody rotten lot,
Are the ragtime infantry!

Currently, Comic Scene is planning to pre-launch their Kickstarter at the beginning of January and go live in February, with a March end date.

So, if all goes well, Ragtime Soldier will be out in print later in 2025!

Here’s the link to Comic Scene. Do leave a comment and tell Comic Scene and/or me what you think. And thanks in advance for your support.

Look out for more news about our Kickstarter for Ragtime Army soon!