Merging fact & fiction in war comics: diversity, identity and social injustice

War comics are a comics genre that primarily retell fictionalized narratives of real-world conflicts for young male readers. The focus of the genre tends to be on honor and heroic actions, especially from young men during periods of conflict. War comics are almost always fictionalized but portrayed as being accurate and giving authentic accounts of war events. War comics have been (and still are) utilized as propaganda to foster patriotic zeal.1 However, some war comics such as Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s Charley’s War, which appeared in Battle Picture Weekly from 1979-1986, aimed to provide more accurate accounts of war. There is an inherent tension between the account or history of war, accuracy - what can be proven to be true to the account, and the authenticity of representations of war - that which feels correct.

Beginning in the Second World War and into the 1950s, war comics had similar tropes and messaging to propaganda at the time, indicating that young boys had a significant role to play in war, treating the enemy as ‘others’, and elevating notions of action and honor. There was a focus on feelings of authentic representation rather than true historical accuracy. However, this is seemingly at odds with the profile of the people creating the comics at the time. While Laird and Rech argue that war veterans were the majority of people writing pocket libraries in the UK at the time,2 there is a tension with the materials that they produced. The messaging of the comics themselves have been found to be “closer to a non-participant’s imaginative fantasy than any Second World War combatants' memory.”3 As Laird argues, “the war comic, then, can serve a number of functions including but not limited to entertainment, documentary and propaganda.”4 In this way, war comics serve as an active battleground for the tension inherent in the 3A Framework (3AF), a theoretical and conceptual textual model which considers the representation of historical accuracy, authenticity and account.5 Using the 3AF, we query comics’ ability to give an account, establishing what constraints exist when creating comics about real-world conflict. The framework considers the objective features that appear within the narrative (Account); current understanding and critical perspective on historical narrative and detail related to the content (Accuracy); and what the comparison between the comic’s account and the identified historical discourse contributes to the historical perspective (Authenticity). While the 3AF has previously been used to analyze historical games, we apply the framework to war comics to reveal the comics medium as being just as rich a medium for discussing the tensions inherent in historical fiction.