ot on the heels of the recent Comics and Conflict event at the Imperial War Museum, Titan Books are re-releasing (on the back of Charley’s War’s success) several popular comic strips from 1970′s / 80′s Battle Picture Weekly (or Battle) in hardbound prestige editions. Darkie’s Mob is one such strip to receive such worthy treatment.

Darkie’s Mob is the tale of Joe Darkie, a mysterious, tough, British hard nut who steps out of the Burmese jungle in 1942 to mould a small, dispirited force of beleaguered rear guard tommies into a deadly commando unit. They fight an unorthodox war behind the Japanese lines, dancing to his own devilish tune of revenge. The story is framed by the device of Private Shortland’s (Shorty) journal. It begins:

“This is the story of a madman. A hard, cruel, son of Satan who led us into the very pit of hell – and laughed about it. Then he began to turn us into animals – the most savage fighting force the Japs had ever known…”

The journal is found in 1946 at the site of a great, unrecorded battle, so right from the beginning we know that things aren’t going to end well for the mob. The story is full of conflict and dissent, within the band as well as in battle. Darkie wears the uniform of a British captain, but Shorty later discovers via a radio transmission that there is no Captain Joe Darkie in the British army. He keeps this information to himself, as without Darkie the men would be lost. From the outset he deceptively leads them further into the bush, throws Shorty a shovel to dig his own grave if he won’t come along, and sets up those that leave him as bait to ambush the enemy. Darkie is driven by revenge, and has no home but the jungle. His fearsome reputation to the Japanese precedes him. He wears a Japanese belt of a thousand stitches, said to make the wearer invincible, torn by him from an enemy soldier he killed. He comes from a long line of tough anti-heroes created by John Wagner for both Battle and 2000AD (he co-created Judge Dredd). The reason for Darkie’s hatred of the Japanese isn’t revealed until the final episodes, but it makes contextual sense and is quite a surprise.

Moose Harris, contributor to the Down The Tubes comic internet site supplied the high quality scans of the old black and white strip for the collection. “Darkie’s Mob was about as grim as Battle could get, ” he says. “John Wagner researched the Burma campaign extensively, and Darkie’s Mob reflected his findings. The scenes where Darkie is nailed to a roof to bake in the sun, where Meeker’s arm is amputated with a hunting knife, and where one of the mob is crucified and left to die, were all based on actual events.”

Darkie is like an anti-Christ figure come down off the roof, leading his bloody wolf pack to their graves, numbers dwindling slowly each week, whether from malaria or an enemy bullet. The artwork by Mike Western is superb. He baulked at some of the scripted scenes harshness, but he has cited this as his favourite strip he ever drew (he also drew Roy Of The Rovers, tamer stuff!). The oppressive jungle locations, the monsoon rains, the accuracy of uniforms and hardware – all packed into four pages of dynamic panels a week, in moody black and white.

Darkie himself is a grinning colossus, bald, mad, bad and dangerous to know, a deadly Kukri in one hand, Thompson machine gun in the other. He is like Brando’s Kurtz from Apocalypse Now,  but in much better shape, jacket slashed to the waist to reveal his belt of a thousand stitches to his superstitious enemies.

The book carries a warning on the back cover that it contains strong language within that may be deemed offensive: anti- Japanese epithets and slurs uttered by the soldiers. It is right not to remove these though. The feelings of soldiers in conflict, especially such a cruelly hard fought and pitiless campaign as that in Burma, cannot be airbrushed from history. As Garth Ennis (Preacher, The Boys, Battlefields) says in his excellent introduction, “It reflects the emotions of the time and place it seeks to chronicle, and does so masterfully.”

Darkie’s Mob is not a story with an agenda per se, such as Charley’s War. It is, first and foremost, an exciting, brutal, journey into the heart of darkness of men on the edge. A tale of dehumanizing obsession, primal and visceral, not at all glamourous. And I first read this when I was eight years old! If you tire of the merry-go-round of superheroes and villains trading quips, give Darkie’s Mob a try. To paraphrase another telly baldy, “Reading comics just doesn’t get tougher than this!”