Battle Picture Weekly (at various times also known as Battle and Valiant, Battle Action, Battle Action Force, Battle and Battle with Storm Force) was a British weekly boys' war comic published by IPC Magazines from 8 March 1975 to 23 January 1988, when it merged with the new incarnation of Eagle after 644 issues. Most stories were set in World War II, with some based on other conflicts, while factual features also focused on warfare.
Devised by Pat Mills and John Wagner in response to rival DC Thomson's similarly themed Warlord, the title was an instant success. Many of the stories printed in the comic have since received critical acclaim and been published in collected editions, notably "Charley's War". Since 2016 Rebellion Developments have owned the majority of Battle Picture Weekly'''s characters and material, and have published revival publications.
Creation
By the 1970s, IPC Magazines were one of the largest comics publishers in Britain, their portfolio centred around a stable of weekly anthologies that sold around a quarter of a million copies each. However, since being appointed Editorial Director, John Sanders became increasingly aware the market as a whole was shrinking, with television the main threat. He found many of his attempts frustrated by the structure of the company; many of the company's staff (including board members) had been with the company for decades since their days as Amalgamated Press and Fleetway Publications, and were strict traditionalists. IPC launched a slew of titles from 1969 to 1971, but few survived for long.
There was also an archaic internal structure where the company's titles were divided into various departments – boy's adventure, humour, girls and so forth – which rarely exchanged staff between each other. Having left staff jobs at IPC's largest rival DC Thomson, Pat Mills and John Wagner began working as freelancers and submitting scripts for the London company's girls comics. Their work for the likes of Tammy, Jinty and Princess Tina featured a degree of social realism and freshness that stood out to Sanders, who looked for an opportunity to work with the pair further. Mills interviewed for IPC's vacant position of Managing Editor, but his forthright criticism of the company's failings went down poorly with the board, but reaffirmed Sanders' belief that fresh blood was needed.
An opportunity to recruit Mills and Wagner came in 1974, when DC Thomson launched Warlord. While war comics had been a staple of British boys' titles since the fifties – both as features in anthologies and as a staple of picture library titles like Commando and War Picture Library – Warlord was the first ongoing weekly to centre on the genre entirely. The variety was instead provided by the stories being spread between different theatres and services; the result was a smash hit. IPC had a firm policy of responding to any new hit by DC Thomson or any other rival by launching a similar title of their own in response, even keeping an inventory of unpublished strips in various genres to speed up the process. However, Sanders wanted a different approach for IPC's answer to Warlord, turning to Mills and Wagner.
Despite initial reluctance to work in the genre, Mills and Wagner took the offer. One of their key aims was to provide a more working class makeup to the characters, something they felt was sorely lacking in other boys' comics. With a tight lead-in of between 6 and 8 weeks the pair started assembling the new title. To keep friction with other staff to a minimum the pair were placed in an office in the girls' department, and told any staffers who asked they were working on a comic for the blind. When word did get out the decision was not popular with the IPC staffers, not least because as freelancers Mills and Wagner were paid better. However, Sanders stuck to his guns.
The plan was the pair would set up an initial round of stories and edit the opening issues before handing over to a staff editor. However, slow progress meant the more experienced Dave Hunt was assigned to help. He was one of the more flexible staffers however and largely tried to curb the pair's perfectionism rather than resisting their ideas. Other important figures in the creation of what would become Battle Picture Weekly were writer Gerry Finley-Day (who Mills and Wagner had worked with on girls' comics); sub-editor Steve MacManus; Eric Hebden, a military veteran who served as technical advisor; and art director Doug Church, who used the web offset printing method to give the comic a clean, detailed look. Mills meanwhile insisted on the use of machine lettering for the strips, a trademark of DC Thomson, as he felt it was superior to the hand lettering available from the time. The only thing they were refused revolved around the free gift cover-mounted on the first issue – a set of transfers depicting military emblems, Mills and Wagner had requested it include German insignia. IPC's competitions editor Peter Lewis, responsible for sourcing the items and a decorated World War II veteran, threatened to resign if they were included; the pair backed down, and Wagner later admitted they had been insensitive.
Publishing history Battle Picture Weekly (1975–1976) Despite the meticulous approach of Mills and Wagner, the first issue of Battle Picture Weekly met its launch date, appearing on 2 March 1975. It contained eight initial stories. "D-Day Dawson" featured a British soldier with an inoperable bullet lodged near his heart; according to Finley-Day, the strip's title was chosen due to prominent coverage of D-Day's 30th anniversary in 1974. "Rat Pack" featured a group of four convict soldiers given suicide missions, which Finley-Day acknowledged was heavily influenced by film The Dirty Dozen; art was provided by Spaniard Carlos Ezquerra, initially on a part-time basis while he worked through commitments to DC Thomson. "The Bootneck Boy" featured the travails of an aspiring Royal Marine; it was again written by Finley-Day, who based the protagonist's attitude on that of Alf Tupper from DC Thomson's "The Tough of the Track" story in Victor. "Lofty's One-Man Luftwaffe" featured a bilingual Allied pilot mistaken for a German counterpart and working to sabotage the Luftwaffe from within. The Day of the Jackal-influenced "Day of the Eagle" introduced Special Operations Executive agent Mike Nelson, whose first mission was to kill Adolf Hitler. "The Flight of the Golden Hinde" concerned an obsessive captain trying to complete a voyage in a replica of the Golden Hind during wartime and "The Terror Behind the Bamboo Curtain" was set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in occupied Burma, which Hunt recalled was constantly rewritten by Mills and Wagner in an attempt to get it right.. The title was a strong seller from the start, and with the setup done Mills and Wagner moved on, the former to begin work on all-new boys' comic Action and the latter to work as editor on the flagging Valiant.
The contents of the comic saw their first shake-up in May 1975, decided by the standard IPC research of requesting readers write in ranking the stories and dropping the least popular. "The Terror Behind the Bamboo Curtain" and "Flight of the Golden Hinde" were the two dropped, making way for "Coward's Brand on Bradley" and "The Fortrose Falcon"; the latter was the first Battle Picture Library strip to not entirely revolve around World War II. However, the new arrivals were based on Mills and Wagner ideas bumped from the launch issue, and neither lasted long. Another thing thrown up by the research was that while Battle attempted to split stories between land, sea and air forces, readers far preferred those about the army to the rest. It wasn't until January 1976 that Battle found another enduring character in the form of Major Eazy – a laconic cheroot-smoking soldier modelled on Britt, James Coburn's character in classic Western film The Magnificent Seven. Drawn by Ezquerra and written by Alan Hebden (son of Eric), the Bentley-driving British officer was instantly popular with readers. Three months later IPC changed printers and Battle was forced to switch from web offset to letterpress. Another popular new arrival was "The Team That Went To War" by writer Tom Tully and artist Mike Western, which featured football team Barchester United enlisting – and getting butchered – en masse in 1940.
IPC meanwhile had launched Mills' brainchild Action to strong sales and critical reaction. The comic's increased level of violence and nihilism spurred Hunt on; he was particularly envious of the title's war strip "Hellman of Hammer Force", launching "Fighter from the Sky" (with a German paratrooper as the protagonist) in response, as well as the experimental "Hold Hill 109", featuring a unit of thirteen Desert Rats whittled down over the course of a defensive action. More whimsical was "Rattling Rommel", which centred on a sentient scout car. August 1976 saw an overhaul of the title caused by the availability of Wagner, who had quit as editor of Valiant in frustration over the resistance he found to his radical changes. His contribution was the brutal "Darkie's Mob", featuring a rogue unit behind Japanese lines in Burma led by the fearsome Captain Joe Darkie. The strip was one of four new stories in the 14 August 1976 edition, which featured a cover by Don Lawrence. The other debutants were "Operation Shark" (young boys in the Channel Islands begin resistance efforts against the German occupation forces), "Yellow Jack" (about a greedy British soldier who fought like a demon for the chance to loot) and "The Unknown Soldier" (about an amnesiac Tommy unaware he's marked for death).
Battle and Valiant 1976–1977) Despite the public campaign that forced Action out of circulation in the autumn, Battle Picture Weekly remained relatively untouched despite its violence. Hunt would recall receiving a letter of complaint about an episode of "Darkie's Mob", but replied that the content was based on a real-life incident and received no further censure. Instead the next change to Battle would come in October when the flagging Valiant was absorbed into the comic. Three strips were continued from the cancelled title from 23 October 1976 – two were war-themed, "Soldier Sharp: The Rat of the Rifles" and "The Black Crow", while Wagner's Clint Eastwood-inspired Judge Dredd-prefiguring maverick cop One-Eyed Jack wasn't. Hunt was not in favour of diluting Battle's all-war content; nevertheless the merger considerably boosted the comic's sales. The other new arrival was Valiants long-running flagship character Captain Hurricane; however his action-comedy would have fit badly with the rest of the comic, and he was instead assigned as host of the letters page. The unexpected merger saw three stories – "Operation Shark", "The Unknown Soldier" and "Yellow Jack" – cut short to make space. Battle and Valiant also received the Airfix Modeller's Club page, hosted by club president and comedian Dick Emery. The manufacturer paid a £100 a week for the page, a sum which Hunt recalled paid for around half of the scripts in the issue.