The artist brilliantly illustrates WWI tanks, zeppelins, gas masks, machine guns, and dreary trenches, creating a surreal, almost sci-fi hellscape. There's heroic sacrifice here, but it's rare and always subverted, often undermined by military commanders. Mills, best known for his Judge Dredd work, eschews any romanticism about war and its horrors. However, Charley's War lives in its episodes, which are filled with ghastly horrors, usually drawn from real-world facts - some of which were even worse than what's presented here. While some are masterful, not all the episodes are equally worthy. While this entertains, a sense of "one thing after the next" or "how will the writer get out of this one?" can intrude, lessening one's enjoyment. The story can feel trapped in the time of its production and, while it subverts these usually heroic war comics, it clearly retains their trappings, substituting horrors of war for heroic challenges while still thrilling the reader in a way that Americans will no doubt find recalls early 2000AD. Pages are sometimes cramped, there's unnecessary and exclamation-laden dialogue, and chapters repeat information with no thought to collection - all signs of the times. Now more than 40 years old, Charley's War is undoubtedly dated: it owes much to the serialized British war comics of the time, which it deliberately undermined.
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