War Picture Library was a British 64-page "pocket library" war comic magazine title published by Amalgamated Press/Fleetway (now owned by IPC Magazines) for 2103 issues. Each issue featured a complete story, beginning on 1 September 1958 with "Fight Back to Dunkirk" and finishing 26 years later on 3 December 1984 with "Wings of the Fleet". The editor was Ted Bensberg. Assistant editors included Geoff Kemp and Brian Smith. Other editorial staff included Pat Brookman, Terence Magee, Clive Ranger, Tony Power and Clive McGee. Art editor was Mike Jones and art assistant was his brother Dave Jones. Other art assistants at various times were Roy McAdorey, Geoff Berwick, Bill Reid and John Fearnley.
Companion titles Air Ace Picture Library (1960–1970) and Action Picture Library (1969–1970) were both folded into the longer-running War Picture Library in later years.
Publication history
Launched in September, 1958, the Amalgamated Press/Fleetway title War Picture Library was one of the earliest (arguably the earliest) "pocket library" titles, and in particular one of the first to feature stories set during World War II. Comprising 64 pages, the tales were, according to writer and editor Steve Holland "page turner[s] of the first order, a shilling shocker that grabbed [the] attention" of a – primarily – young audience. Written and illustrated, at least in early years, "by creators who had lived through the war themselves, many on the front line", War Picture Library was able to show clearly to its target audience "what [the reader's] fathers and uncles had been through in combat". Holland said that War Picture Library brought the Second World War to life "[i]n all its grim glory".
The stories were not limited to tales of combat, some set in "the bomb-torn streets of London during the blitz", although the bulk of the stories released several times a month for over 2000 issues were set in all fields of combat. Crucially, reflecting the cultural shifts in popular fiction, the war stories did not always feature "a heroic journey", nor yet were all characters automatically "gung-ho" stereotypes: "[a] diversity of characters", human emotion and even some considerable sympathy for 'the enemy' was not out-of-place in some tales.
Running until late 1984, "War Picture Library was a monthly window into a six-year global storm that affected every family in Britain". The first-hand knowledge of many of its creators also enabled the stories to ring true, and disclose – in sometimes simplified, and always fictionalised terms – the truth behind the stories told in history books.
Creators
Uncredited from the start, as were the vast majority of comic books written and drawn in the late 1950s and early 1960s, War Picture Library continued the trend of UK-based comics publishers such as D. C. Thomson and publisher Fleetway in continuing not to credit on-page the names of its creators.
Many names – and before them, styles – became familiar to UK comics readers, however, and still more names have been documented over recent years. Contributors to War Picture Library included artists such as Fred Holmes, Giorgio Trevisan, Harry Farrugia, George Heath, G. R. Parvin, Nevio Zeccara, Annibale Casabianca, F. Solano López, Juan Gonzalez Alacreu, Jose Ortiz, Ramon de la Fuente, Jorge Moliterni, Renzo Calegari, Faruk Geç, Luis Ramos, Gino D'Antonio, Carlos Pino and Hugo Pratt.
Writers are often harder to identify, but among those identified by Steve Holland (et al.) are Donne Avenell, Ian Kellie, Douglas Leach, Willie Patterson, Alf Wallace, David Satherley, Roger P. Clegg, A. Carney Allen and S & J Thomas, also Gordon Brunt, author of 40 Air Ace Picture Library issues between 1961 and 1969.
Hallmarks
War Picture Library was among the first war comic to use real dates, places, settings, battles and (occasionally) battalions to more accurately place the stories in the historical action, even if the stories themselves were fictional. This came about largely because so many of the (early) writers and artists had actually fought in the battles they wrote about and drew. Steve Holland cites the example of G. R. Parvin, a "relatively minor contributor to the war libraries", who "was captured and made a P.O.W. by the Japanese". Parvin's story is told in the autobiographical Yasumai! (Digit Books, 1958), and "[a]t least one" of his contributions to War Picture Library (as well as Battle Picture Library) "was set around the Railroad of Death in Burma".