Crikey! It’s Saturday! – “Of course, you realise, this means war…” | The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Crikey! It’s Saturday! – “Of course, you realise, this means war…”

Sat, May 31, 2008

Comics and cartoons, Crikey! It's Saturday!

When most people think of American comics they still think of superhero characters. Granted, they may well think of them more as graphic novels than the traditional monthly pamphlet format but, no matter the format, it is the red, white and blue mighty mortals that first come to mind.

What then of British comics? When I talk about British comics with people I tend to get two common answers: most often British comics will be defined by two titles – the Beano and the Dandy. This may reflect the fact that unlike most mainstream American comics, British comics retained the anthology format and therefore for most people it is the title that comes to mind rather than particular narrative forms or even characters. If I probe a little deeper with people and ask about the types of stories in British comics I usually get quite a sophisticated answer.

“That depends,” they will say, “on whether they are boy’s comics or girl’s comics.” For girls it will be emotionally charged stories of love and loss. For boys it is usually, so I am told, war and sports stories. Now I must point out that these are not seasoned comic collectors that I am talking about. They are students on my scriptwriting and media courses. Or people I end up chatting with about their memories of comics. And of course by war stories they mean Second World War.

British comics have always had a strange love-hate relationship with war stories. On the face of it, war stories provide the writer with opportunity to tell stories of battlefield heroics in a fast-moving environment with clearly defined good and bad guys. The trouble is it can be devilishly difficult to find the right war (as a glance at current government foreign policy rather proves! – Joe).

One of the reasons why British comics focus so much on the Second World War is not, as popular opinion might have it, because it was a just war that we clearly won. There are other reasons for so many writers using that setting for their tales of battle-born brotherhood.

Pat Mills Joe Colquhoun Charleys War trenches.jpg

With the notable exception of Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s Charley’s War (Battle) and the occasional Commando story, the First World War is a difficult war for comics. Trench warfare is difficult to illustrate unless, as in the case of Charley’s War, you concentrate on trench life and the decidedly un-heroic aspects of the war. Trench warfare is static and provides little opportunity for a small group of soldiers to take off on a vital secret mission to turn the course of the war. The other theatres such as Africa and the Middle and Near East may offer more potential for storytelling but they lack the importance of manoeuvre and strategy found on the Western Front.

Other wars engaged in by the British Empire are hampered by the very fact that they are wars of empire and in many cases the moral certainty of a war such as the Second World War is absent. Historical wars also give the writer the problem of explaining exactly who’s fighting whom and for why. Some of these wars can be very boring to explain. Sixty words on the Boxer rebellion anyone? Or why Britain ended up attacking Russia in 1921? With the school history curriculum no longer mentioning, never mind explaining, these older conflicts it is easier for writers to stay with what people know (and perhaps easier to research uniforms and equipment for the artist since WW2 is well documented pictorially – Joe).

If writers are concerned about setting stories in unfamiliar territories they can always opt for something a bit more contemporary. In 1987 Battle presented ‘Invasion’ a story set five years previously in the Falklands Conflict. A couple of recent Commando comics have strayed into modern warfare with stories of desert warfare – although not yet a full-blown story about either Iraq or Afghanistan.

When it comes to warfare, I suspect we will stay with the ‘safe’ war for some time to come.

Issue #5 of Crikey! is out now and can be ordered from the official website or found in your friendly, neighbourhood FPI store.