Graphic Novel Review - Slaine: Warrior's Dawn

 

By the time Slaine appeared in the pages of the comic, 2000AD (issue 330) I had long ceased to be a regular reader and although I was familiar with the character, having read the odd episode from time to time, I wasn't really familiar with the strip. That was until I picked up this graphic novel that collects together the first era of Slaine's adventures.

The world of Slaine is based heavily on Celtic legends, particularly those from Ireland but there's a mish-mash of historical myth and legend used to build the world. For instance, the Blood Eagle torture features which comes from Skaldic poetry and is most associated with the Viking legends. It is also interesting that most historians these days are of the mind that the blood eagle was a literary conceit and never actually occurred. It matters not since everything works so well in the world of Slaine, even the time travel which, I believe, features more heavily in later adventures.

The first episode of Slaine, titled The Time Monster sees Slaine pitted in a prize fight against a Tyrannosaurus  Rex and introduces the wonderful character of Ukko - the celtic warrior's sidekick who like most fantasy dwarfs loves gold and is totally lecherous. He's also extremely entertaining and is great comedic device to get Slaine from adventure to adventure. At one point he leads Slaine to buy a prison, hoping to make a great profit but of course things don't work out as planned. They never do and Ukko's money making schemes are often foiled by the barbarian - at one point they come across a cart carrying mead and rather than selling the drink, Slaine decided they should drink it - 'Robbing carts is thirsty work.'

Slaine has the ability to warp spasm - think of the Viking legends of the berserker and you pretty much get the picture - though Slaine's spasms actually physically change him so he becomes a literal representation of the marauding monster he becomes. It sounds weird and it is, but it works supremely well.

There are three artists used in these early stories Angie Kincaid (here credited as Angie Mills), Messimo Belardinelli and Mike McMahon and each have wildly differing styles - McMahon's sketchy art takes some getting used to since it can sometimes be very detailed and at other times deceptively simple, whilst Belardinelli's work is incredibly busy - no one draws grotesque characters like he does. The first artist Angie Kincaid was actually married to Pat Mills when she drew this story and her style is very European - it's such a pity she only did the opening episode since it was she who set the bluepring for Slaine that all others would have to follow.

I really enjoyed this book - laughing as I read in several places as Mills is a master of black comedy. It really is great stuff and if you're wondering why Slaine became such an iconic character then all the evidence is here.

Hugely recommended for anyone interested in great comic book entertainment

Currently available in print and digital.

Classic Comics - Action

 Action ramains one of the most controversial British comics - It was actually, banned, withdrawn from sale after complaints in the media resulted in questions being asked in Parliament.

The comic was devised in 1976 by Pat Mills, a man who enjoys the status of legend these days. It was intended to reflect the social changes and issues in the UK in the late 1970's and it didn't flinch in it's depiction of violence. Several titles were bandied about for the comic Boots, Dr Martins and Action 76 were all considered until the title Action was decided upon.



Many of the stories in Action were what Mills called "dead cribs", essentially rip-offs of popular films, books, and comic heroes. Rather than being a straight copy, the "cribs" in Action had their own slant on the idea. Hook Jaw, for example, combined the graphic gore and shark anti-hero of Steven Spielberg's 1975 Jaws, whilst Hellman of Hammer Force was a Warlord/Battle-style adventure told from the point of view of a German Panzer commander and very much taking its influence from the hugely popular paperbacks of Sven Hassel.

The first issue was published on 7 February 1976,  The comic was instantly popular, particularly for its gritty tone and graphic gore. Within weeks the media had picked up on the title's violent content. The London Evening Standard  and The Sun  ran major articles on the comic, with the latter  by dubbing Action "the sevenpenny nightmare" (the cover price was 7p). Over the next few months Action was the centre of a campaign led by Mary Whitehouse to censor or ban the comic. IPC eventually started to moderate strips in order to forestall possible boycotts by newsagent chains such as John Menzies and W H Smiths.

In September 1976 John Sanders appeared on the television programme Nationwide , where he tried to defend the comic from a vigorous attack by interviewer. Although Action remained popular, its days were numbered. Pressure within IPC's higher management, and alleged worries that the two major newsagent chains would refuse to stock not just Action, but all of IPC's line, led to the 23 October issue being pulped.

The title returned on 27 November (cover date 4 December), but the violence was toned down, replaced by a safer, blander feel. Stories like Hook Jaw were no longer drenched in blood and gore, but instead were full of safer and more reliable heroes, and traditional villains. Sales dropped drastically, and the last issue before merging with Battle was published on 5 November 1977 - dated 11 November. Battle became Battle Action until 1982, at which point the Action name was dropped entirely.

The use of vivid-red blood shocked moral guardians

The war strips had a gritty feel.

Even the letters page had a subversive edge. Readers were encouraged to insult the editor.

Lefty replaced Hook Jaw for the colour centre pages

The Good old days of comic books

 Growing up comic books were of vital importance - They mattered to a young boy. There were just another of the essentials needed for any kind of  life. As every young boy knew the true necessities for a happy life were food, water, shelter, assorted candy and comic books.

It wasn't like today where kids can grab a DVD

from a shelf, switch on a computer or fire up a video game. This was pre-home computer, pre cable television, (WTF is streaming) even VHS video tapes were still some time in the future.

 We had three TV channels - two from the Beeb and one commercial station - entertainment, particularly for an imaginative young boy was thin on the ground. Sure we had our cartoons but they only played at certain times of the day, the rest of the time the small screen seemed obsessed with soap operas, game shows and current affairs. Hardly the material designed to stimulate young minds.

All in all you'd think we were starved of exciting adventure stories designed to stir the blood, but there was one avenue open to us. 

There was a medium offering wildly entertaining stories whenever the fancy took us.

 That medium was the comic book - the newsagents shelves were stuffed full of books with titles like Tiger, Warlord, Battle, Victor, Action - they cost pennies (I think the average price of a comic book when I started buying on a regular basis was around 5p) and yet provided entertainment worth many times that paltry sum.

In the far off United States (a country that seemed so exciting to any British kid) the comic book industry was dominated by colourful stories of super heroes, but in the UK super heroes, with very few exceptions, failed to take off.

 If Superman's capsule had crashed down in Clacton instead of the Mid-West, then Kal-Ell would have been grounded from the off. 

It wasn't that British comic books were any less fantastic, but  by and large the settings for our tales were far more grounded in reality. Of course we had our science fiction strips, Dan Dare and so forth but for pulse pounding adventure it was the war comics to which we turned.

War comics were always popular in the UK - And for decades after the guns of the second world war fell silent, British kids celebrated our victory over the Nazis in wonderfully drawn, black and white comic books. Characters like Lord Peter Flint kept a stiff upper lip while besting evil Nazi spies, Union Jack Jackson fought alongside the Americans and usually got them out of some tough spots, and the Rat Pack were too good at Hun killing to leave rotting in a high security prison. In skilfully drawn pages, scores of humble Tommies stood up to the might of the enemy and gained victories against incredible odds.

By the time I started reading comics in the early 1970's there was already a rich history of boy's adventure comics - Victor, Valiant, Lion were the hot titles but these belonged to the previous generation and it was newer titles like Warlord from DC Thomson and Battle Picture Weekly from IPC that caught my imagination.

Warlord first hit the stands in 1974 and was far grittier than the usual war comics for sale during that period - so successful was it that rival publisher, IPC launched Battle Picture Weekly in order to snare some of the readers eager for this new kind of comic book reader.

Warlord was the first UK title to be dedicated solely to war stories, other comics usually contained several genres. And right from the start it set the bar very high in terms of artwork and storytelling.

Below there is a video presentation in which I look through the first issue of Battle Picture Weekly.

Battle Picture Weekly, first published in 1975, was launched directly as a result of the success that rival publisher, D C Thomson were scoring with Warlord, and to my mind became far the superior title. With a creative team that included Pat Mills and John Wagner how could it not be! This was the comic that would one day feature a truly ground-breaking first world war strip by Pat Mills, called Charley's War which remains arguably the best war strip ever produced.

“Pat (Mills)  and John ( Wagner) wrote the initial Battle episodes and then farmed them out to other writers. GFD ( Gerry Finley Day) was the author of D-Day Dawson. Lofty’s One-Man Luftwaffe – 

'That was John and Pat. Their brief was not only to create a new title but bring new talent into the industry. We’d worked with a bed-rock of people. When you launched a new title, you rang up Tom Tully, he would do four of the new strips, Ted Cowan – people of that era – Ken Mennall. A lot of the people in Battle #1 were new to me."  Original Battle Staff Editor, Dave Hunt.

Perhaps the main difference between Warlord and Battle were rooted in the British class system. Battle felt working class, while Warlord seemed to be establishment. No better is this illustrated than in the original flagship characters in each title. Warlord had Lord Peter Flint, a wartime secret agent who when not away saving the country, was living the life of a wealthy aristocrat, his pleasures no doubt funded by the tax payer. But Battle's answer to the character was Mike Nelson, a working class bruiser who was billed as Britain's deadliest secret agent. And where Lord Peter Flint believed in giving the enemy a fair shake, Mike Nelson had no such morals - in the very first frame of his first appearance in Battle he shoots a German soldier in the back.

The original Major Easy

Now back in the day I read both Warlord and Battle, but Battle soon became my publication of choice. Where Warlord's heroes would dispose of the enemy with ease and then return home for tea and cakes, Battle's heroes seemed to bleed. The Mike Nelson character would become less important to Battle as the title found its true identity. The first adventure would run until May 1975, and although the character returned from time to time, it was the other strips that became reader favourites. Strips like Rat Pack, about a group of convict soldiers, was a huge success with readers, as was D- Day Dawson and in 1976 Battle introduced a character that became so iconic that he has been re-invented as Cursed Earth Koburn in the pages of Judge Dredd Magazine. This character was Major Easy, created by Alan Hebden and Carlos Ezquerra, a laid back James Coburn lookalike who usually fought the war from a horizontal position.

MAJOR EASY LIVES ON AS CURSED EARTH COBURN

It was in 1979 that Battle finally came of age, with the strip Charley's War which was written by Pat Mills and drawn initially by Joe Colquhoun. Debuting in the landmark 200th issue, this was a different kind of war story. For one thing it was set in the First World War, when most adventure strips tended to favour the second world conflict, and for another it was an anti-war strip. 

YEP, AN ANTI WAR STRIP IN A WAR COMIC!!!!

'I did not want Battle to glorify war, and Charley's War is an anti-war story," said Mills. "I think that in the 1970s and 80s it was legitimate, more so than it is today, to describe the Great War as a tragedy, a mistake and criticise the incompetence of generals. In 2014, revisionists have been trying to improve the image of the generals." 



Charley's War is a true work of literature - a harrowing, intricately drawn look at the Great War as seen through the eyes of working class, semi-literate Charley Bourne. Pat Mills took the inspired method of telling much of the story through young Charley's diary. The strip was truly ground-breaking, featuring not gung-ho adventure but a look at the war as it truly must have been.

'A combination of well-researched and heartfelt scriptwriting, Pat’s work is the antithesis of the ‘war is hell’ gung-ho Sergeant Rock-style story. While never doubting for a second the heroism of the brave men in the trenches, The Great War is shown to be the tragedy it was, a meat-grinder that took the lives of millions of soldiers and set the stage for the even greater horrors of World War Two.

The artwork for Charley’s War was provided by Joe Colquhoun, one of comics’ great unsung heroes. The Gustave Doré of British comics, Colquhoun created beautiful expressive storytelling week-in week-out. Both Joe and Pat put their hearts into Charley’s War, and readers of all ages were drawn to the care evident in their work.

'We often imagine that Armageddon is a horror that awaits us sometime in the future. But Armageddon has already happened. It was World War One." Pat Mills




Charley's War are available as a series of handsome graphic novels from Titan Books.


These days the British comic industry seems to consist of 2000AD and a plethora of licenced titles with the free cover gift more important than the stories between the covers, and the days of true variety in British comics is a distant memory - The Spectator bemoaned the lack of a British comic book industry in this article HERE

Pat Mills can be found here

For a history of Warlord
For a history of Battle

CHARLEY'S WAR - RETURN TO THE FRONT

Following on directly from the last volume, Blue's Story which saw some Blighty-side misadventures for Charley as he came to the aid of Blue, a deserter with a story to tell. This volume in the collection of ,what is possibly the best British comic strip of them all, tells of Charley's return to the front.

These are handsome hardcover books with introductions and episode notes added to the strips. They are also respectfully jacketed with black and white war time illustrations with only a poppy in full colour. This gives them a classy feel which is fitting to the quality strips inside by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun.

Charley's War was different to all other strips appearing in boy's war comics. For one thing everything was shown as realistically as possible and there were no dumb heroics. Here the characters are fully flushed out and act as real people would in the horrendous situations the brave men who fought in the first world war had to endure. It was also historically accurate with the time line of events in the story following the real conflict. There has never been a comic strip quite like Charley's War and it is doubtful there ever will be again. Charley's War is so good that I make no reservation in stating that this is without doubt comics legend Pat Mills' greatest ever work.

This is the fifth volume in Titan Books series which, I hope, will continue to publish the entire run of strips that were originally published in Battle comic. There's no announcement of when the next volume will be available, as there were in previous volumes, so I hope Titan Books are going to continue with the series in this format.