Comic books:Throughout human history, war has been a constant, shaping and destroying societies and causing individuals to show both their best and their worst qualities. The wars of the 20th century were particularly savage, spreading in all directions and leaving no corner of the world untouched. In David Kendall's selection of comics and short graphic novels about war, we see a breathtaking diversity of responses to this fact, from all over the world:
comics creators from the US, Russia, Japan, Britain, Sweden, Germany, and Croatia tell stories, both true and fictional, about the first World War, the second World War, the Vietnam War, the Falklands War, the first Gulf War, the 2003 Iraq war, and civil strife in Myanmar and Colombia.
They bring to bear a range of styles, both visual and narrative, the likes of which has never been seen between the covers of a single volume.
The stories are all self-contained, with one exception, for no anthology of war comics would be complete without a nod to Charley's War, first published in Battle Picture Weekly in 1979. Pat Mills and Joe Colquohoun's meticulously observed and deeply moving saga of an ordinary soldier in the first World War is represented here by its first instalment, in which Charley Bourne signs up for the British army just in time for the Battle of the Somme. Right from this ominous beginning, Charley's War was the war comic strip that changed the definition of "war comic" in Britain, making the tales of Nazi-smashing and derring-do that had dominated the genre up to that point seem shallow and tawdry by comparison.
Yet two such tales are included here as well - The Landings in Sicily from the 1960s, and The Road to Glory from the early 1970s - and if they lack the nuanced characterisation and political sharpness of Charley's War, they are still solidly entertaining and stirring, and The Landings in Sicily has at least one page that is breathtakingly beautiful.
AMERICAN WAR COMICS of the same era had a different slant. Unlike their British counterparts, American comics writers and artists were credited for their work, and this slightly higher clout resulted in somewhat more room to manoeuvre. If they wanted to tell a war story that was not a pro-war story, this was possible - just about - though one of the stories included here, the gently didactic Landscape, criticises the then-ongoing Vietnam War in harsh enough terms that the magazine in which it was originally published, Blazing Combat, was banned from US Army Post newsstands; the loss of circulation was enough to sink the magazine shortly afterwards.
Landscape is anti-war, but it is the softest, gentlest anti-war story in the collection, contrasting sharply with Keiji Nakazawa's harrowing I Saw It!. Nakazawa was a child living in Hiroshima during the final years of the second World War, and survived to tell his story by the sheer chance of being sheltered by a wall when the bomb was dropped. I Saw It! has a nightmarish quality, because the events it depicts were nightmarish to live through; Raymond Briggs's savage Falklands War satire The Tin-Pot Foreign General & the Old Iron Woman is made nightmarish as much by the way in which Briggs tells the story as by the story itself. In Briggs's vision, Margaret Thatcher and Gen Galtieri of Argentina are transformed into gigantic metal monsters, while the people who die and are crippled on their behalf remain small and human, sketched in blurry, fading pencils to underline their vulnerability. It's not subtle, but it's undoubtedly powerful.
THE SAME CANNOT be said for the weakest entry in the book: The Legion of Charlies, by Tom Veitch and Greg Irons, comes from the "underground comix" movement of the late 1960s, and shares that movement's characteristic crude exuberance, untempered by the constraints of logic or good taste. The Legion of Charlies makes an arguably valid satirical point in its first six pages (setting the Manson Family murders side-by-side with the war in Vietnam), but then squanders its rhetorical force on another 26 pages of gleefully incoherent taboo-breaking that adds up to very little - though it remains intriguing from a historical perspective as an uncensored contemporary reaction to the war.
Such a huge and diverse collection - 26 stories in 512 pages - is impossible to summarise in a few words. I haven't even mentioned the two stories by comics legend Will Eisner, or Lone Hawk, exquisitely drawn by Alex Toth, or the two stories by Croatian duo Darko Macan and the late Edvin Biukovic exploring the mentality of soldiers in combat zones, or Ulli Lust's School Essays of Berlin Kids About the Year 1945, with its flat, matter-of-fact recounting of terrible events. The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics is crammed full of unexpected gems like this. Whether read cover-to-cover or dipped into at random, it is exactly what anthologies should be: rich, varied, and endlessly rewarding.
Katherine Farmar is a freelance writer.
The Mammoth Book of Best War Comics Edited by David Kendall Constable & Robinson, £12.99