Changes

|title=Charley's War: A Boy Soldier in the Great War

|author=Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun

|publisher=Titan Books

|date=August 2014

|summary=The go-to book for World War One comics, as the initial hefty chunk of this mammoth saga gets us through the Somme battered and bruised.

}}

The answer, it seems to me, when writing war stories, is to take something we can all imagine – the young lad signing up and finding out the real truth behind the glorified propaganda of his masters – and still making something unexpected out of it. People have to die in unexpected ways, because that's what war is. Soldiers have to face misery, because that's what war brings them. The writer has to be a godlike entity able to give the power of victory or defeat to either side, because the common or garden soldier character certainly can't. In putting all this and more into a comic for boys, where it had previously been thought a WWI story with the rigid and static nature of trench warfare would be neither visually nor dramatically appealing, Pat Mills both challenged himself and won many over with his brilliance. Young Charley certainly gets to know the misery, unexpected death and people in command of his fate. And with the dramatic narrative artwork here, so do we.