Charley's War

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View books by Pat Mills, Joe Colquhoun.

Marvellous - Rated
Carries on from the fantastic first volume - Charley's exploits are the essence of nostalgia for blokes of my age & this series of reprints of his WW1 exploits are a joy.
The art work & story telling, the detail & the nostalgia, just one great big bundle of pleasure for an ageing (& quite frankly, cynical & miserable) git like me - it makes me feel the worry free existence of being just a young lad, all over again.
As with the rest in the series, worth every penny, particularly if you enjoyed Charley's adventures first time around.

Awesome return of a classic! - Rated
Massive kudos to Titan for reprinting this classic and original strip - in my youth as a reader of Battle it was Charley's War and Johnny Red I loved the most. With those copies long since binned it is a real treat to see this strip released in such a nice hardback edition. Here's hoping Titan do the same for Johnny Red, Darkie's Mob and other classic stories from Battle.

There is only one slight drawback to this edition - Pat Mills' intro. Mills writing soon degenerated after Charley into the crudest agit-prop and his loopy intro - claiming that somehow WW1 was fought at the behest of American industry (err....) and referencing the ludicrous Farenheit 9/11 as evidence of something-or-other really puts a bad taste in one's mouth before reading CW itself. Mills is the archetypal middle-aged lefty, stuck in the 1970s but deluded into thinking of himself as a radical - the sort of person who would read the Guardian and take it seriously - what Orwell derided as the "pansy left".

So ignore his rantings and get stuck into the strip itself - one of the brightest moments in British comics history.

Fantastic... - Rated
If you remember Thursday mornings as a little boy waiting for 'Battle' to arrive then it is time to get Charley's War...

I sat and read it in a morning...fantastic stuff and it all came flooding back

Superb trip down memory lane.

What we really need is a SIX STAR rating ...... - Rated
It's a testament to Messers Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun that the writing and art work stand the test of time and the hue of the rose coloured spectacles with which men of a certain age view there childhood comics/t.v/curly wurly's etc.
It's fair to say that this comic strip effected me profoundly and changed the way in which I perceived history, I had just studied WWI at school when this strip appeared and it opened my eyes to the war and the way it was fought. Horses in gas masks? snipers in armour? tank crews wearing chainmail? The British Class System in the Trenches? he's making it all up said I. a summer holiday trip to the Imperial War Museum soon enlightened me. The research both in script and art surpass anything I've ever seen in this genre and also beat hands down several 'serious' works i've read on the subject. This in a boys comic, which also produced such works as "Darkies Mob", "HMS Nightshade" and "Johnny Red". Buy this for yourself, it's twice as good as what you remember. Then let your kids read it.

Classic, dark, detailed. - Rated
Fans of Charley's War brought up on the 1970s/1980s strips in Battle will need no introduction to the work of Mills and Colquhon.

For everyone else, you're in for a rare treat. Nowadays its much more common for comics to question or be morally ambiguous. When written, this strip was quite literally, revolutionary. It did the Etaples Mutiny years before the Monocled Mutineer, for example.

Colquhoun's exceptionally detailed artwork, almost photographic in its quality, is the perfect foil to Mills' challenging scripts. For anyone wishing for a take on WW1 that goes way beyond the gung-ho, look no further. Excellent stuff - and roll on the following volumes.