There's no avoiding it, I’m a product of the social environment that I grew up in. A walking, talking (occasionally slurring but that’s wine for you), combination of the views and social conditions of the decade I was born into - the 1960s - and the decade that would come to rule my teenage years - the 1970s. Whether or not I agreed with the politics or social rules of those two decades, their joint footprint has left a lasting imprint on my mind. Where it lingers to this day, rearing its indifferent head from time to time; edging me ever closer to the Land of Grumpy Old Men; an Irwin Allen production, I suspect.
    Nearly all the adults I encountered in 60s and 70s were full of recollections of the Second World War, underpinning their motivations on a daily basis. For them, and by association, myself, zee war voz far from over. Not that we sat round a cosy coal fire and WW2 anecdotes tripped of their tongues for hours on end. No great stories of personal strife or sacrifice ever came my way, not, I suspect, due to shortage. It felt very much like such personal memories had been folded into the fabric of their lives. There was just ‘The War’, the national exhaustion it wrought and the end of Great Britain as an effective power on the world stage.
   The country was, at least according to my grandfather, between pub crawls, (heavily disguised as long walks), going down the tubes.
   End of story.
   Well no, not quite.
   Not if comic books were going to have anything to do with it.
   Things may well have been ‘not what they used to be’, but there was an outbreak of war comics in the 1960s. It seemed like a veritable invasion force of them that landed in my local paper shop and swept (for me anyway) all before it. Suddenly, publishers and public alike were eager to revisit and bask in past glories. Better that, I suppose, than face the national destiny as an also-ran country, whose last great flexing of military might had gone down in history books as The Suez Crisis.
   Ahead of the curve, but pointing in the right direction, the first issue of War Picture Library appeared in 1958, resplendent with its indicative Fight Back to Dunkirk story line and evocative, guns blazing, front cover. Historically, Dunkirk had been a rout the first time round. However, that could be easily re-imaged on the printed page.
Combat Picture Library, March 1959; Air Ace Picture Library, January 1960; Battler Britton, as a hard cover annual, 1960; Air War Picture Stories, February 1961; Battle Picture Library, January 1961; Commando, July 1961; Attack 1962; War At Sea Picture Library, February 1962; Battlefield, 1962; Combat Comic Album, (albeit with Dell reprints), 1965; Giant War Picture Library, June 1965; Front Line, January 1967.
   The Victor was published in January 1961 and the first issue of the Valiant debuted in October 1962, featuring a proud and uniformed Captain Hurricane giving the thumbs up and, it felt, permission to look back at Great Britain’s finest hour with as much gusto as the Valliant’s readership could muster.
   These ‘sticky plasters’ for Great Britain’s national pride captured the crest of a nostalgic wave and rode on it for what felt like forever. Except forever turned out to be approximately a decade and a half.
   By the middle of the 1970s, war comics were struggling. Patriotism had morphed into jingoism and the 70s, it would seem, would have no truck with nostalgic and backward looking whimsy. Besides, in war it had been easy to spot the bad guys, they always wore black. The 70s, however, delivered characters whose sense of morality was often ambiguous at best and totally redundant at its worst.    From Dirty Harry to The Sweeney, from Doomwatch to The XYY Man; cynical and cold were the watchwords for heroism in the 1970s and tub thumping national pride was like a square peg in that particular round hole.
   Pictorial warfare met its Waterloo.
    Except, maybe what was really needed for a successful war comic was less patriotism and more realism. Maybe not completely in the way film director Sam Peckinpah updated the Western with The Wild Bunch in 1969, but close.
   War comics needed grit and realism and less of the slapstick that Captain Hurricane had, through no fault of his own, veered into by the mid 70s. A character who’s war torn exploits had lost their, for want of a better word, punch.
   So, on the 8 March 1975, IPC launched Battle Picture Weekly (BPW), a full on war comic that would fire my imagination every Thursday it was published. Through its pages I begun to get a grasp what my grandfather’s dark moods had been about and why my uncle was disconnected from the rest of the family due to his childhood evacuation from London.
   Here are some of my personal favourites from that debut year of Battle Picture Weekly. The usual suspects, plus a few of those not readily mentioned in dispatches, but who were, nevertheless, in their own way, valuable building blocks for the future of BPW.
   For an idea of how popular BPW was in my secondary school form, the moment Mr Dawson (from the English Department) stepped into our classroom he was instantaneously christened and from that day on known as, D-Day. That was how impressed we all were with Battle’s opening character, the tough as nails and bitterly determined, D-Day Dawson (see Crikey! 12). The British army sergeant, Steve Dawson, who took a bullet to the chest, lodged near his heart. And still carried on fighting when he could have been sent home and quietly waited for the bullet to work its way into his vital organ, finishing him off in peace and quiet, in a country ruled by The Nazi Party. If you look up heroism in the English Oxford Dictionary there’s a picture of Sergeant Steve Dawson. And that, frankly, is explanation enough!
   Day Of The Eagle, however, was a strip I never expected, Dawson half hails from the true Brit and plucky derring do brigade, but Special Operations Executive secret agent, Mike Nelson - code named Eagle - written by Eric Hebden and illustrated by Pat Wright, played by rules that were not (thankfully) covered by the Geneva Convention. And here was that moral ambiguousness of the 70s, dialled up to ten. Mike Nelson was apt to shoot, bayonet or garrotte first and then ask questions.
   The Eagle’s first mission was a straight forward enough task, the assassination of Adolf Hitler. So not a tough one, then. Equipped with the best weapons a Bond Q look-alike could muster, the Eagle got real close too. Though, alas, not close enough and in the 24 March 1975 issue, having witnessed the German army detonate an atomic bomb, with only one arrow left in his cross-bow and two targets, Hitler and the scientist behind the bomb, the Eagle opts for offing the scientist and dies a hero’s death taking one last German army officer with him as a sort of consolation prize.
   However, sensibly BPW was not about to go and let Mike Nelson up stumps and join the choir invisible forever. He rapidly reappeared in The Death’s Head Dossier and then fully, as his old lovable self, in the aptly titled Return of the Eagle. Demonstrating that it was impossible to keep a dead, popular, man down. For that realistic edge that Battle would hone to a fine art, in one episode, the Eagle found himself located in a Nazi Concentration Camp, as a prisoner!

   A battlefield often needs characters that are larger than life, fly in the face of conventional wisdom, appear to lack discipline, look dishevelled, don’t follow orders and don’t know when they are beaten.
   Enter Major Easy, a languid American army officer, constantly smoking cheroots and packing a six gun along with his army issue sniper’s rifle. Easy was an amalgam of two Clint Eastwood, characters, Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western ‘man with no name’ and Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry. And knowing the referencing made Major Easy a must read and instantly familiar. Carlos Ezquerra’ art, rough and ready was exceptionally suited to the callousness of warfare. Writer Alan Hebden kept the action flowing and Major Eazy’s continual laid-back disregard for the rules of war, especially from a British point of view (it certainly wasn’t cricket) was the very backbone of the character. Memorably, in a friendly fire instance, the Major shot down an American plane strafing the British convoy he was heading. (The plane was a P51 Mustang for those Airfix junkies out there; yes you, you over there, strangely addicted to Humbrol paint thinners and polystyrene cement; mmmmmmmmmm Humbrol).
   Staying with the airborne theme (I promise not to mention all the warplanes by name…….) King of the Yanks had a short stay in Battle (18 July 1975 - 8 November 1975), written by Ron Carpenter and drawn by Stanley Houghton. Flight Lieutenant Jeff King D.F.C finds himself posted to an American bomber squadron flying the B-17 (I lied) Flying Fortress. His job is to give the green bomber crews the knowledge of his RAF bombing experience. Naturally enough this was a recipe for airborne tactical argy-bargy. Carpenter has a ball with the animosity between the British and American forces, each believing the others air-raid tactics are fool-hardy and dangerous. The character Jeff King ends up as being seen as something of a liability by the American air-crews, as he often gets the job done but at the cost of lives.
   Stanley Houghton’s art was at the other end of the spectrum to Ezquerra, with its clean lines and attention to detail but this was really a case of opposites attract in Battle’s well thought out pages.
   24 May 1975’s edition of BPW had me practically lobbing 6p at the newspaper vendor outside The District line’s Southfields Station, just before I was due in school. My hasty actions had been heightened by the final instalment of Terror Behind The Bamboo Curtain (TBTBC); the cover proclaimed: Die English pig! Is this the end for Big Jim Blake? It was more than enough to get my fingers flipping through the pages until I found TBTBC languishing in the last three pages, which struck me at the time, as it does now, as not appreciating the conclusion of the strip.
   A Japanese prisoner of war camp, run by the suitability named Colonel Sado, had been brainwashing British prisoners into attacking their own forces. In this last instalment, Jim Blake had escaped and was returning to the POW camp to uncover the dastardly plan. He’s successful and Colonel Sado gets what’s coming to him by tripping over his own cat (villains seem to have an assortment of pets on hand for some reason; maybe its to show their sensitive side) and landing in a nice wide pit of quicksand. Jim Blake does the decent thing though and watches his tormentor drown.
   An ending I could certainly relate to.
   Written by Charles Herring and drawn by  Giancarlo Alessandrini, TBTBC was another mold breaking strip from BTW first year. Helping, I certainly feel, to lift BPW out of the run-of-the-mill rut that other comics had long fallen into, giving BPW an edge it would exploit in the coming years.
Sticking with the war against the forces of The Rising Sun, Burma 1942 was the setting for Coward’s Brand on Bradley. Private Ben Bradley, sporting a thick yellow stripe down the middle of his back through no fault of his own, had to disprove the accusation of cowardice set against him. Bradley goes native and makes it his sole mission to find the men who framed him. Another short run strip, 31 March 1975 to 30 August 1975, written by Robert Ede and drawn by Ripol, there was a feeling of the ‘old school’, Valiant/Victor inspired story line in Coward’s Brand on Bradley. It was not that dissimilar to A.E.W. Mason’s adventure novel The Four Feathers, published in 1902, dealing with the same issues of name-clearing and wrong-doings. However, it was tough and did not shy away from the battle theatre.
   And, to a degree, that was really BPW in a nutshell, a mixture of the outlandish, the exotic and the more staid strips, which were in keeping with how war comics had been but were destined never to be again.
   For me, this was why that first year of BPW’s existence was so worthy of note. It is very easy to focus on the strips that were ground-breaking and innovative. But I feel it’s worth remembering the lesser strips, as they gave what was to come in Battle Picture Weekly the shoulders to stand on.
There were 673 issues of BPW, the Valiant was absorbed into its pages from the 23 October 1976, Action suffered the same fate with the 19 November 1977 issue and BPW became Battle Action (I still groan at that title to this day) and the 8 October 1983 issue started the Action Force toy tie-in. Five years later, 23 January 1988, the tables turned on Battle and it became the victim of the popular publishing death of ailing comics, immersed as it was into a re-launched (and to my mind, lacklustre) Eagle. It was not a befitting end.
   One last thing; back, one last time, to 8 March 1975.
   Those combat stickers in the very first issue of Battle Picture Weekly were quickly adorning my school exercise books, my desk, my bedroom walls, my school bag and anything else I could stick them on. I believe I stuck them up in the hope that the adults I knew would appreciate that I was on the way to understanding them a little better. Or, at the least, I had a starting point into the mindset that governed their day to day lives.