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Pat Mills to challenges Great War revisionists with University of Liverpool lecture

By John Freeman on December 10, 2014

Charley’s War co-creator Pat Mills will challenge the current revisionist “spin” of that century old conflict at a University of Liverpool talk this month.

Pat, who is a Visiting Professor in the Department of English, (he was given an honorary professorship by the University back in 2011) created the story of Charley Bourne, the underage British soldier who joins up and heads to France aged 16, alongside artist Joe Colquhoun in 1979. The strips he wrote ran in the publication, Battle Picture Weekly until 1985, when Pat’s readers left Charley disillusioned and on the dole, as Hitler rose to power in 1930s Germany.

Describing the series as a “career highlight”, Pat told the University of Liverpool web site: “The Great War has become a controversial subject because of the way it is represented in the media today as a noble sacrifice. The idea that anything was wrong about it has been thoroughly played down.

“What we never hear is that it was a calculated act of secret intelligence. You don’t have to have a PhD in history to recognise that the whole thing is so reminiscent of the way Tony Blair drew the country into war in Iraq. There was the same secret diplomacy, the same half-truths to the House of Commons.”

The event forms part of the Security and Conflict public lecture series and is organised in collaboration with the School of the Arts.

• The Famous War Comic: Charley’s War A Challenge to the Revisionist Spin on the Great War, with Pat Mills takes place on Wednesday 17th December 2014 at 6.00pm in the University of Liverpool’s Sherrington Building. Tickets are free but must be booked via www.liv.ac.uk/events/charleyswar

• Read the University of Liverpool’s interview with Pat in full here on their web site

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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.