Check out the kickstarter http://kck.st/4hC7oNw
“There was a ruthless media black-out on any anti-war stories or films during the centenary of World War One. There was censorship like I have never seen before in my entire career!
Even within the comic community! The disastrous and tragic Battle of the Somme –
featured so strongly in Charley’s War – was proclaimed a ‘great victory’ by revisionist,
military historians. These revisionists set out to excuse and justify the deliberate massacre of a generation. The reality of the conflict in my best-selling saga Charley’s War, that reached generations of young readers, and changed their minds about war, was obscured by a monstrous lie.
So it became – for me – a matter of great importance, to pick up where Charleys’ War left off and continue to show the truth of the Great War. It was not easy. Not least 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.
And so, at long last, I’m delighted to say we are working on our first 48-page volume of Ragtime Soldier to release as a Kickstarter, 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.”
Pat Mills February 2025
