Charley's War
Thursday, April 10th, 2003I happened to be googling for comics I used to read when I was a child, Transformers UK, Chromobots, Battle Action Force… I started looking because I’d just seen the terrible Buckaroo Banzai and got it confused with Rocket Raccoon. Anyway, I found this wonderful site about the subliminal Charley’s War series that used to be in Battle. Battle was a comic made up of many shorter stories, 4 pages or so a month per story.
Battle was a pro-war comic but Charley’s War was a superbly researched series set in WWI and all about the utter stupidity of that war. I hadn’t realised how well it was written, to me at my young age it was just the best story there, with Charley, a character who was easy to relate to.
The other great story was Johnny Red, a story about an english fighter pilot flying sturmoviks with the Russians on the eastern front in WWII. Both stories were also found in the Eagle comic and had a long history to them. Johnny Red was a bit Biggles, but also showed a side of the war which wasn’t very popular in other media, ie) the eastern front.
On slightly more up to date terms…. I hear a lot of people in the United States at the moment being quite anti the French, and to a certain extent the Germans and the Russians. There’s no understanding of how the nations can be so anti-war. Well, it seems quite simple to me.
Look at the number of dead in WWI and WWII. In terms of deaths, the UK and the US were not hit nearly as hard as the French were in WWI, or the Germans and Russians in both of the wars. Throw in the French retreat from west africa and indochina, and the utter hell Russia has lived through this century, with Stalin’s genocides. It’s hard to imagine why they might be tired of aggressive warmongering. If not for the political situation the UK have had since Thatcher’s revival, I think the British would have joined suit.