Battling Britons

Battling Britons
by Justin Marriott

April, 2021

Like most Baby Boomers of American pedigree I grew up reading war comics, most of them from DC, occasionally from Charlton. I thought the Sergeant Rock stories in Our Army at War were overwrought and melodramatic, but I liked Weird War Tales, Star Spangled War Stories, and G.I. Combat.

I never even knew that the UK had its war comics until the Fall of 1984, when I picked up some 2000 AD Yearbooks from the bargain bin of a comic book store near the Louisiana State University campus in Baton Rouge. One of the Yearbooks had a brief interview with artist Carlos Ezquerra, and an accompanying illustration of 'Major Eazy'. Thus did I become aware that the UK did, indeed, publish war comics. But getting hold of any of them was simply not feasible back in those days. There were no shipments of Commando or Battle Picture Weekly being flown or sailed across the Atlantic to comic book stores in the States.........

Well, the indefatigable Justin Marriott, the UK’s leading expert on mass market paperbacks, returns with another publication devoted to Anglophone popular culture........and this one deals with war comics published in the UK from the 1960s to the 2000s: 'Battling Britons'.

Interestingly, unlike the smaller sizing usually deployed for Marriott’s ‘bookzines’, ‘Battling Britons’ opts for a 8 ½ x 11 inch sizing (refer to my photograph for a side-by-side comparison).

Like Marriott’s bookzines, ‘Battling Britons’ is print-on-demand, so for me, as a Virginia resident, ordering the book from amazon took only a couple of days to complete.

Mindful that a substantial part of the readership is likely to be American, ‘Britons’ includes an introductory assay describing the publishing history of war comics in the UK. The bulk of these comics were (and still are) issued as 64-page, black-and-white ‘pocket’ books, similar to the comics digests published in the USA.

 

The digest titles, which include the venerable Commando, usually presented two panels per page, and took advantage of their length to offer more in-depth storytelling and characterization. 

In 1974, Scottish publisher D. C. Thompson launched the anthology series Warlord, which adhered to the A4 sizing (8 ¼ x 11 ¾  inches) used in the UK for weekly comic books. Warlord was a major success and prompted rival publisher IPC to issue its own weekly war anthology, Battle Picture Library. 

Although printed in black-and-white on a rougher grade of paper, and with their stories limited to four-page installments each week, the weeklies managed to gain a substantial following among UK readers well into the 1980s. 

Within its 162 pages, ‘Battling Britons’ provides more than 200 reviews of war comics that appeared in either the digest or weekly formats. A ‘grenade’ rating system, from 1 grenade (don’t bother) to 5 grenades (a classic that belongs in every fan’s hands) is given to each review. The bulk of the reviews are authored by Marriott, with additional reviews from veteran contributors to Marriott’s publications: Steve Myall, Jim O’Brien, and James Reasoner. 

There are copious black-and-white illustrations throughout the book, and while there is no denying the fact that the printing processes used in the comics issued during the profiled era were decidedly ‘low-resolution’, still, it’s possible to see that many titles featured work by accomplished artists, and Marriott and his co-contributors make note of this in their reviews. 

A ‘Sources’ section of the book provides information on how one can obtain copies or reprints of the profiled war comics; The Treasury of British Comics, an imprint maintained by Oxford publisher Rebellion, is an obvious first stop, as it has issued compilations of such renowned titles as ‘Charley’s War’, ‘Death Squad’, ‘Major Eazy’, and ‘Battler Britton’.

Thumbing through the pages of ‘Battling Britons’ surely will spark nostalgia among Brits of the Baby Boomer era. For Americans, the material will of course be less familiar, emphasizing as it does the British perspective on World Wars I and II (although other conflicts, such as the Napoleonic Wars, receive treatment). 

Some of the psychological underpinnings of these comics can be a bit hard to grasp, such as the conflicts between the officers ('donkeys') and the enlisted men ('the lions'), which reflect to some extent the inherent conflict of the British class system. But you can argue that the inclusion of these aspects of the British war experience gives these comics a novelty that you likely won't find in their American counterparts.

The verdict ? If you are an American Baby Boomer who enjoyed the war comics of Charlton, DC, and Marvel, then you’re certainly going to find some intriguing and worthwhile content in ‘Battling Britons’.