The Godfather of British Comics and 2000AD creator Pat Mills has launched his successor to Charley’s War – Ragtime Soldier. Art is by 2000AD artist Gary Welsh and Phillip Vaughan. You can support it on kickstarter now here The kickstarter ends Thursday 27th March at 9pm GMT.
The kickstarter continues the story originally published in 2018 in the comic ‘Great War Dundee’ and expands it into a 48 page graphic novel. Pat says of the art team ” I am delighted to find an artist who would have the same artistic talents as the great Joe Colquhoun, the artist-creator of Charley’s War. Finally I hit gold with Gary Welsh and Phillip Vaughan. Their brilliant work has the same affection, authenticity, drama and, above all, emotion that we all remember from Joe’s ground-breaking and unique art.”
Pat continued, “We are working on our first 48-page volume of Ragtime Soldier to release as this Kickstarter to raise the funds, and for general publication, later this year. In it, we begin the saga of Robbie McTaggart, a young soldier in Dundee’s legendary Black Watch, and his comrades who laughingly called themselves ‘The Ragtime Infantry’: ‘We cannot fight, we cannot shoot, what earthly use are we?’, even as they fought heroically and suffered terrible casualties at the Battles of Loos and the Somme.
I had discovered so much more since writing Charley’s War. So in Ragtime Soldier we relate these NEW and darkest stories of World War One. Stories that no one has dared to tell before and will never be dramatized anywhere else. How our soldiers were given drugs to send them over the top and how they became desperate addicts after the war. How there was provable trading between the British and the German enemy in order to keep a conflict going that made millions in profits for the arms manufacturers.
Ragtime Soldier has the same comedy, comradeship, heroism and tragedy as Charley, but it has exciting differences too. We now see the war from a heart-warming Scottish and Dundee perspective, the city where I started my writing career, and with a Scottish creative and publishing team behind it. And we also discover the sinister events that happened after the war on the Home Front.
The adventures of Robbie McTaggart and his fellow Ragtime Soldiers, our forefathers, need celebrating before their endeavours fade and before people start believing that the military revisionists’ lies are actually the truth.
Now is the perfect time to remember the Ragtime Soldiers.”
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/comicscene/pat-mills-ragtime-soldier
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