Charley's War: The Great Mutiny

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of Charley's War: The Great Mutiny (Volume 7) (Titan, 2010).



Overshadowing the release of this seventh collection of Charley's War has been some interesting commentary by the strip's writer Pat Mills. First, I was pleased to learn that Titan intends to release the entirety of his run on the series, which originally appeared in Battle Picture Weekly in the early '80s. Drawn by the late Joe Colquhoun, Mills wrote the first 300 or so episodes before stepping down, leaving Scott Goodall to take the helm for another few years. It is apparently Titan's intention to issue all of Mills' run across ten hardbacks. That's wonderful news, because this really is the finest comic about war ever made, and even simply sitting down to marvel at Colquhoun's artwork without taking the time to engage with the story is a terrific pleasure.

But I was also very sorry to read that Titan is not paying any royalties from their releases to either Mills or to Colquhoun's family. That's a ridiculous and stupid shame; I can't freaking believe that this is the 21st Century and publishers are still acting like that. I understand that, especially with a pleasantly reasonable $20 retail price for such a nice hardcover, the profit margin for these books must be slim - the audience, sadly, must still be very small - but seriously, guys, charge an extra five bucks a book and send Joe's family a little check, would you? It puts a damper on all the other, long overdue Battle reprints that are allegedly coming out. I hear that the first Johnny Red book is finally out in some places - it was reviewed over at The Comics Journal - but Diamond hasn't delivered a copy of that to the comic shop where I buy them.

Nor, for that matter, did Diamond ever deliver volume six of the series, which is why I begged off buying this for a couple of months, fingers crossed in vain that I would get to read it before volume seven. Eventually I caved and really enjoyed this book. It's titled "The Great Mutiny" and about the first half of the book covers that interesting incident at Étaples, and I have had a great time reading background to that. It was a much smaller rebellion than I realized, but what made it remarkable was that it happened at all. (I've also learned that William Alison and John Fairley's infamous Monocled Mutineer was really playing fast and loose with the historical record by placing Percy Toplis in Étaples in time for the uprising, but I can grudgingly forgive it, since Paul McGann was so good as Toplis in the miniseries.)

Anyway, after Étaples, Charley goes back to the front and wants to make up for some of his earlier actions by volunteering as a stretcher bearer, and then things go completely to hell. It really is remarkable that Mills was able to sustain the energy and drama in Charley's War for as long as he did. At this point, we're something close to 200 episodes into the series - the only failure of these reprints, other than compensating the creators, is the lack of original credits and dates, as seen in other recent Titan collections - and, apart from a three-month break in the original publication as Colquhoun recovered from a heart attack, there was a new episode of Charley's War damn near every week for six years. I don't know how in the world they managed it. Recommended, but with some newly-found distaste about the publishing biz.

The Best of Battle

What I try to do with reviews at this Bookshelf blog is keep it simple and spoiler-free, and let you know whether I'd recommend you pick up a copy of what I just read. Seems to work okay. This time, a brief review of The Best of Battle (Titan, 2009)



Battle Picture Weekly was, of course, one of the best and most important comics ever published. It wasn't just a simply entertaining, well-written and drawn collection of great war stories, it was a critical building block in the development of modern comics. Since without it, you'd never have had a 2000 AD, I've always been interested in it, and any chance to see these terrific stories is one worth taking.

The series and serials in BPW were drawn by some of the best artists working in Britain at the time, including Eric Bradbury, Joe Colquhoun, Carlos Ezquerra, Cam Kennedy and Mike Western. Many of the stories were devised by Pat Mills and John Wagner, and while they only scripted a few themselves, they assigned others to the likes of Gerry Finley-Day and Alan Hebden. They all developed storylines, sometimes sharply different from each other in tone, with vulnerable anti-heroes, radically different from the indestructible leads in American war comics. Reading just one issue of BPW after an identikit Robert Kanigher DC adventure is the greatest breath of fresh air in the medium.

Titan Books, which has been collecting Battle's most lauded strip, Charley's War, for several years now, landed the reprint rights to several old IPC properties what seemed like an eternity ago, and late last year finally released the first of their new Battle collections. The Best of Battle is similar in feel to their two Roy of the Rovers samplers, three hundred pages of reprints in a slightly oversized format with a paperback cover. The book contains the first 3-5 episodes of eighteen different series. Each comes with an introductory page and a short blurb written by either Mills or BPW's one-time editor, Dave Hunt.

I think the format is a good one, as far as samplers go, but it looks to me like Titan was a draft or two shy of assembling something really special. The most aggravating example is Hold Hill 109, a six-part serial by Steve MacManus and Jim Watson. Four of the six episodes are included in this book, which is nice, but what are the odds that Hold Hill 109 will ever be reprinted anywhere else? Between Charley's War, Johnny Red and Darkie's Mob, there are 12-13 episodes which are either already available in Titan collections or are due for release within a few months. Couldn't eight of those pages be given up to see all of Hold Hill 109?

I'm also a little surprised that Battle Action Force isn't even mentioned in the book. Admittedly, even with the nice artwork by John Cooper, the toy line tie-in, sort of a parallel antecedent to Hasbro's G.I. Joe line of the 1980s, was the sign that the comic's brightest moments had passed, but it still has a huge number of fans. Evidently there's some rights issues at work, as Palitoy still owns those characters like Baron Buckethead or whoever it was they were fighting prior to Cobra Commander, but considering just how important the Action Force was to Battle's later days - Johnny Red and Charley's War wouldn't have made it to their ends without Action Force sales propping up the comic - I think it should have been mentioned.

If readers would forgive the regular quibbling of a Monday morning quarterback, the book is truly a fine introduction to Battle, and one which will certainly get new readers excited about the other material Titan has planned. Six volumes of Charley's War are already out, the first collection of Johnny Red should be with us by the end of the month, and a complete Darkie's Mob - all 44 episodes - is solicited in the current Previews for later in the spring. The book also promises that collections of two of my favorite Battle series, Major Eazy and Rat Pack, are on the horizon.

The only other quibble that I have is that getting accurate shipping dates and advance plans from Titan is really like pulling teeth. Most of their books seem subject to interminable delays - where the devil is the third volume of Jeff Hawke, guys?! - and so it's impossible to guess exactly when we'll get the follow-up volumes that I've been craving. It's simply bad business to serve up an appetizer as tasty as this and shy away from the main course!

(Excerpted from Reprint This!)

More British stuff

Here's how this works: I finish reading something, and I tell you about it, and I try not to bore you to death. This time, reviews, of sorts, of Charley's War: Blue's Story (Titan, 2007) and Judge Dredd: Complete Case Files Vol. 10 (Rebellion, 2008).



In the fourth of Titan's collections of the amazing Charley's War, the action shifts to the home front. On leave in London, Charley Bourne meets a deserter from the French Foreign Legion. As the military police pursue them, the man who calls himself Blue tells Charley the story of the battles at Verdun and Fort Vaux.

The detour from the principal Charley's War narrative into this look at the rest of the war originally ran for six months in the pages of Battle Picture Weekly and was notable for a number of innovative cover pages. Most memorable of these is a great image of the trapped, starving soldiers, their supplies cut, holding Fort Vaux and looking out helplessly while a German taunts them, pouring a canteen of precious water onto the muddy ground.

If you've been reading Charley's War, as of course you all should, then you already know that Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun managed something genuinely amazing and moving in every installment. If you're new to the series, this is actually a fine place to start before you go back and pick up the first three books. The reproduction is a little dark and fuzzy in places, and greyscaling the color covers does not always work as well as we would like, but the presentation is great, with introductory material and lengthy afterword commentary by Mills. Highly recommended.

(Note that the fifth book of Charley's War is actually supposed to be in US shops today. Diamond was extraordinarily late shipping this book to my store of choice, hence the belated review.)



The tenth Case Files edition, featuring around 50 episodes originally published in 1986-87, is among the best in this series. Oddly, Judge Dredd is all the better for the lack of a consistent, regular artist, even the good ones like Ron Smith, who, I understand, had taken a sabbatical to do advertising work around this time. With so many great artists all vying for space, there are more opportunities for individual work to shine.

Brendan McCarthy makes a huge splash with the four-part "Atlantis," for instance. Kevin O'Neill gets three episodes in this book, and they really are something to see. "Varks," a story about aliens that reproduce by turning other lifeforms into creatures like them, would have been a creepy and gruesome story in anybody's hands, but O'Neill really turns it into a freakfest. Other artists with standout work include Steve Dillon, Ian Gibson, whose "Paid With Thanks," about a ghost who does not appreciate innovative accounting, is a riot, John Cooper and Cam Kennedy.

John Wagner and Alan Grant were reaching the end of their celebrated regular partnership around this time, but hindsight doesn't show any cracks or tension in these episodes. They are having a ball coming up with more and more goofball citizens and criminals, and letting Dredd reach the end of his patience with their quirks and foibles. Absolutely essential reading, and highly recommended for everybody from longtime fans to newcomers.



(Originally posted October 08, 2008 at hipsterdad's LJ.)