In the 1960s and 1970s the British war comic was big business. Titles including War Picture Library, Battle Picture Weekly and Battle Action, mainly saw the heroic Brits triumph over the evil Nazis. But these comics were much more than just a tale of goodies versus baddies.
Many of them depicted full battles and therefore were an historical record of the First and Second World Wars. Sadly, many of them and their remarkable artwork were consigned to the bin when the genre dipped in popularity at the end of the Seventies. But a dedicated team of comic collectors and researchers at Rebellion Publishing have tracked down the surviving pieces and the results are shown in an exhibition telling the story of the British war comic currently at York Army Museum.
“Britain has been publishing comics continuously for over 130 years. During that time, conflict has remained a staple of comic book storytelling and by the 1960s and 1970s war stories were the most popular genre,” explains Rebellion’s Head of Publishing Ben Smith.
“But British comics boomed and then busted in the late Nineties and the glorious history that had taken a century to build was put in mothballs.
"The owners of the various archives didn’t make that work available so consequently the story disappeared and at Rebellion, which has been publishing 2000AD the Home of Judge Dredd for 25 years, we realised that if we didn’t go out and acquire the rights and the catalogue and ownership of these comic archives the story and the history of British comics was going to be lost.”
They founded the Treasury of British Comics in 2018 to conserve, curate and present the history of British comics.
“This exhibition is a wonderful example of that,” says Smith.
“It tells the story of war comics across a century we go from the real boom in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies and then individual stories about what made those comics interesting to people at the time and into the present day.
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And it seem the exhibition is already proving a massive hit with visitors young and old coming from as far afield as London and Scotland to see it and footfall up 25 per cent as a result.
Into Battle: The Art of British War Comics is at York Army Museum, 3 Tower Street, York, YO1 9SB until November 17
Garth Ennis has said he was really influenced by war comics:
Ennis has explained that as an avid reader of British war comics during his formative years, he did not read superhero comics until his late teens, at which point he found them ridiculous... As a World War II aficionado, Ennis also said he finds characters like Captain America "borderline offensive, because to me the reality of World War II was very human people, ordinary flesh-and-blood guys who slogged it out in miserable, flooded foxholes. So adding some fantasy superhero narrative, that has always annoyed me a little bit."