Eerie beauty and bravery in a mirthless comic

“Charley’s War” was conceived as a weekly comic for Battle Weekly, a late-1970s comics journal. It’s darkly spectacular, a mix of Bill Mauldin-style art, high jinks, innocence and grief about World War I. “Charley’s War” started in 1979, and it has that late-Vietnam-era feel for the unreal. One senses Will Eisner’s “The Spirit” behind the story-boarding and Pink Floyd’s antiwar “The Wall” behind its concept.

If you take the time to let the images sink in, “Charley’s War” has the make-you-cry factor of the Mel Gibson movie “Gallipoli,” yet it wasn’t influential. American and British audiences back then, as now, were more interested in fantasy comics than reality-based ones. Vast destruction, it seems, is only palatable in the imagination.

But World War I vets wrote fan mail to “Charley’s War.” Written by Pat Mills and illustrated by Joe Colquhoun, the story starts when Charley Bourne’s friends trick him into dragging Fred, the city’s last bus horse -- a true nag -- to the British army recruitment office. Charley signs up instead, lying about his age, though he’s too dim, or innocent, to do enough math to change his birthday. But the recruiters don’t care, so Charley ships out to the Battle of the Somme, one of the most hellish battles in history with 20,000 dead and 40,000 wounded on one day, July 1, 1916.

Charley and his mates are normal young guys. When they’re taken prisoner, Ginger tells the Germans, “We’re salesmen for the Western-front Mud Company, mate -- out collecting samples.” Back in the trenches, the technology-minded Smith 70 (there were so many named Smith that they were given numbers) boils water in his machine gun: “That cuppa cost five hundred bullets.”

Later, in an especially eerie scene, Charley, Ginger and a tormented man called Lonely climb a tree to avoid the heavier-than-air poison gas. Charley makes chimpanzee-like sounds at the Germans, who’ve also climbed into the trees. The gas drifts in the forest like a ghost mist while rats nest in the branches with the bedraggled men.

Charley, Ginger and Lonely emerge from the chlorine gas and see a horse and rider both in gas masks -- a saber and medieval pike are in the rider’s hands. Lonely yells, “Seee! Seee! ... The horsemen of death! They’ve come to take Lonely back down to hell with them!” It’s actually a rider with the British cavalry, accurately drawn down to the halter rope dangling beneath the animal’s mask. The convergence of technology and medieval warfare seems the stuff of fantasy, a bizarre reality for the distant future, but “Charley’s War” is true to life. In an essay at the end, Mills writes, “We tend to think of apocalyptic war as happening ‘manana’ -- at some terribly distant time in the future. It’s chastening to think we are now living nearly a century after a science fiction war.”

Charley is sweet -- a lad with a deep tenderness for horses -- but gullible. However, “You don’t need to be clever to fight in the trenches,” declares Charley’s recruitment officer. Or, as Ole Bill says later, “Soldiers what think, start gettin’ the ‘orrors ... an’ once they get the ‘orrors -- they don’t last long.” Dread may require intelligence, but friendship does not, nor does grief. Charley loved that old bus horse, so while on grave-digging duty, he befriends Warrior, a battle horse. Later, he rides Warrior to safety after seeing the horses and riders of the Deccan Horse, one of the last great cavalry charges in history, mowed down by machine guns.

“Charley’s War” is poignant and intelligently antiwar. The men don’t talk about what it’s like. Their names for German bombs -- “Christmas Puddings,” “Wooley Bears” -- keep outsiders from understanding the lethality of the trenches. In their songs they long for Piccadilly and Leicester Square. The story nips at you. In their idiotic bravery, they begin to look beautiful: They’re young men who don’t have to do anything but be who they are. And then it hits the reader that many of them will die. *