| abstract | - Described by Andrew Harrison as "the greatest British comic strip ever created", Charley's War tells the story of an underage British soldier called Charley Bourne. Charley joins the British Army during World War I at the age of 16 (having lied about his age and told the recruiting officers that he was 18; they conveniently overlook the fact that Charley gives his date of birth on his application form as 1900), and is quickly thrust into the Battle of the Somme. The strip follows Charley's life in the trenches and his experiences during the war. Colquhoun put a meticulous level of research into the already well-researched scripts which Mills provided. The strip rarely flinched from providing an extremely frank portrayal of the horrors of war, so much so that in some later reprintings some of the artwork was censored. Mills added a political slant in the strip not seen in British war comics and avoided the standard heroics common in war comics generally. In addition to depicting Charley's own experiences of the war, the comic took the risk of going off on several tangents, temporarily shifting the focus to characters in different locations and time periods. The first and most successful tangent was the story of 'Blue', a British soldier in the French Foreign Legion who fought with them at Verdun in 1916 before deserting and making his way back to England (where he meets Charley). Another diversion was when the storyline turned to Charley's younger brother Wilf and his experiences as an observer/gunner in the Royal Flying Corps in early 1918. The final and least successful tangent was the story of Charley's cousin Jack Bourne, a sailor in the Royal Navy and the story of his ship HMS Kent and its participation in the Battle of the Falklands in 1914. Unlike the previous diversions, this new change of setting received poor feedback from readers and the editor of Battle ordered Mills to return the storyline to Charley in the trenches, much to Mills' disappointment who had originally planned to continue Jack's story on into the Battle of Jutland in 1916. 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. Mills was replaced by Scott Goodall and the story was moved to the Second World War and became a more conventional war adventure strip. However, the series ended in the early part of the Second World War after Charley is one of the lucky ones successfully evacuated from Dunkirk (along with his son), realising he is too old for soldiering any more. The story ends with him wondering how he came to become a soldier in the first place, leading into a re-run of the strip within Battle Picture Weekly until that comic folded. In reality, the ending of Charley's War was down to the poor health of Joe Colquhoun, which had already caused the strip to be delayed several weeks. Out of respect for Joe, there was no question of getting another artist to take over production, and it was felt best to simply draw it to a close. It was featured in "Boys and Girls," the second programme of Comics Britannia on BBC Four.
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