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Hartley, Matt (April 26, 2008). "Charlie Wilson's intellectual-property war". The Globe and Mail . Retrieved August 16, 2013. Charley's War was featured in "Boys and Girls", the second programme of Comics Britannia on BBC Four. Blue reappeared two years later when it turned out he was one of the ringleaders of the Etaples mutiny. My thanks to John, Joe, Simon and Moose for their help in getting this interview out to a wider audience. I’m also grateful to the team behind Comic Heroes , who gave me some nice gigs during the lifespan of that magazine.
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.Charley’s War, which has been collected in ten volumes by Titan Publishing (and a new omnibus collection of the first arc, A Boy Soldier in the Great War), tells the story of Charley Bourne, a naïve young soldier who is trapped in the madness of World War One. This seminal comic strip, by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun, ran in Battle Picture Weekly from 1979 until 1985. The film was directed by Mike Nichols (his final film) and written by Aaron Sorkin, who adapted George Crile III's 2003 book Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History. It stars Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, with Amy Adams and Ned Beatty in supporting roles. It earned five nominations at the 65th Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and Hoffman earned a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the 80th Academy Awards. If you’re discovering the story for the first time…I told you this Pat Mills geezer was a genius didn’t I?) ‘Weeper’ Watkins A young nurse who lost her fiance at Gallipoli in 1915 and who tends to Charley when he is hospitalised in early 1918 with an accidental self-inflicted wound. After a tense beginning, the relationship blossoms into romance and the pair eventually marry and after the war have a son, Len. In Charley, at least, you will have the satisfaction of seeing the merchant of death cringing in his hellish factory, saying ‘I’ve got to get away. This place is a death trap!’
Ragtime Soldier in Great War Dundee magazine, my WIP WW1 thriller novel and the 50th Anniversary of Battle Comic. In 2019, Pat Mills wrote a lengthy and damning post about the way Rebellion treats him and other creators. Read it yourself, but the allegations include: Using one of his books as a loss leader to launch a new series, with all the associated financial burden of that falling on the creators with no compensation; Deliberately withholding the number of units sold from creators; Rebellion taking a staggering 90% of profits from each book sold, leaving just 5% for writers and 5% for artists; That other creators are afraid to speak out because they worry that it will stop them getting work from Rebellion in the future. Old Bill: Bourne – get your kit on and get on the bridge as part of the armed guard to make sure this rabble don’t break out and enter the town” Though later parts of the story covered the Russian Civil War (and, in episodes written by Scott Goodall, the early part of the Second World War), Pat Mills has stated that Charley's story should end at the end of the First World War, [ citation needed] and this has been reflected in the collections published by Titan Comics. Matthew: Pat did eventually leave and another writer, Scott Goodall, took over, but you’re not reprinting his strips.Pat and Joe understood that and how to give you those heart-breaking scenes. They understood how to layer the humour and the violence. I just think they had a story they knew from the beginning and knew how to communicate it. A story they wanted and needed to tell. Oily’s only motivation is money – he could never understand the morals and scruples that Charley has. For that alone he is typical of most people in any era!
Ginger is very typical of the fatalistic soldier so common on the Western Front. He reminds me of Frank Richards, the author of the book Old Soldiers Never Die , which I recommend to anyone who hasn’t read it. The humour of the British soldier in such indescribable hell is conveyed very well by Richards as it is by Ginger Jones. For example, what about this snippet of dialogue? The Sarge: “Let’s hope that brave lad makes it Jones”. Ginger: “Yes good mate was Charley, but he would drink his own bathwater” He tells the judgmental Charley his life-story and they become firm friends with the common ground being the hatred of the waste of lives in France. In a scene from about the third episode Charley runs into no man’s land to rescue a wounded man. Old Bill shouts a warning to him to stay put due to a German sniper. “You ain’t no hero in a penny comic, Bourne!” How true. In addition to its accuracy, Charley’s War is a very human story. War exists on the edges of human experience where people do horrible things, but it also gives way to bravery and emotion, which this comic has in spades. Several scenes stood out to me: a traumatized soldier, the only survivor of his platoon, digging his own grave; a German soldier pleading mercy and telling British troops about his family before being executed; Charley’s letters to his family, including a letter where he asks his mom to stop getting tears on her letters because he can’t read them. Without question, Charley’s War is about the characters.Pat Mills seems to drive the point home time and time again, making the usual enemies of war comics become almost allied (British and Germans) and fingers the real enemy as the ruling classes who treated the war as some kind of sport. An enemy within personified by characters such as Captain Snell, Charley’s sadistic company commander.
Charley's first platoon commander and easily the best officer he serves under during the war. Public-schooled but enlightened, brave but never blood-thirsty, Thomas is a decent man who represents the best of his class. A one-time crony of Grogan's and the regiment's barber. He holds a grudge against Charley for his role in Grogan's death and they often clash. He dies at the Third Battle of Ypres, after taking shelter in a shell hole full of mustard gas. Since Neil wrote this feature, 300 soldiers were pardoned in 2006 – see BBC news story– JF Mutiny at Etaples The strip followed Charley through to the end of the war and through into the invasion of Russia in 1919. However, in January 1985, Mills quit the strip before being able to complete the story (he intended the story to end in 1933, with Charley on the dole as Hitler is made Chancellor of Germany) due to a dispute over his research budget. [2] Because today it’s the only example of mainstream popular culture – outside of film and television – that challenges the establishment view of World War One.Conducted in 1982 for Fantasy Expressby Stephen Oldman and reproduced here with the kind permission of Stephen Oldman and editor Lew Stringer Hollywood Foreign Press Association 2008 Golden Globe Awards for the Year Ended December 31, 2007". goldenglobes.org. 2007-12-13. Archived from the original on 2007-12-15 . Retrieved 2007-12-16.
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