Al Murray has penned his first comic book story, a D-Day adventure for the war comic Commando.
The Pub Landlord and Second World War buff has co-written the 6,000th issue of the 65-year-old magazine with historian James Holland, his co-host on the military podcast We Have Ways Of Making You Talk.
Published on Monday, their 63-page story, Sweet Revenge, follows the first Allied troops to land in Normandy as part of D-Day in June 1944, with Private Regan, a veteran of the Dunkirk evacuation four years earlier, climbing into a glider and returning to France.
Illustrated by Esteve Polls with cover art by Keith Burns, their tale features dogfights with the Luftwaffe and British troops mining German tanks on the beaches.
Murray, whose maternal grandfather was killed at the Battle of Dunkirk before his mother was born, and whose great uncle died fighting in Burma in 1944, inherited his fascination with soldiering from his father, a lieutenant colonel in 131 Parachute Regiment Royal Engineers in the 1950s.
‘All of his officers had been people who’d fought in the Second World War,’ the comedian told Gyles Brandreth on his Rosebud podcast yesterday.
‘As well as the fascinating history on my father’s side, there’s the grim actual footprint of the darn thing. That by the time you grow up, it’s not an adventure, it’s not bugles at dawn and fluttering flags at sunset, it’s the grim, bitter cost of the thing. And that’s what we digested.’
Murray continues his All You Need Is Guv tour in Cardiff tonight, after appearing at the sixth We Have Ways Fest spin-off festival in Buckingham.
He told Brandreth that ’growing up in the 70s, there was Airfix, Action Man, war films, there was Dad’s Army even… I wonder what on Earth my grandmother made of me playing with an Action Man when I was five, six, seven, having lost her husband and her brother? What must she have thought of that? And me making model Spitfires? How did she process that 30 years later when I was a little boy?’
Of the war, he added: ‘It doesn’t matter who you are, or what you thought of it, one way or another, it was going to get you, involve you, it was going to change your life, flip it upside-down … and that’s why I find it relentlessly fascinating.’
Posting a preview of the Commando Sweet Revenge story on his Instagram feed, Holland said that when Dundee-based DC Thomson approached them about writing for the world’s longest-running and last surviving war comic, it was ’not a chance I was ever going to turn down’.
In writing for a classic comic title, Murray follows the likes of Armando Iannucci, who created a Spider-Man short story for webslinger’s 60th anniversary; John Cleese who co-wrote Superman: True Brit, offering a satirical take on the Man of Steel landing in rural England; and Patton Oswalt who wrote a M.O.D.O.K. mini-series for Marvel. Frankie Boyle also co-created and wrote the satirical sci-fi comic Rex Royd for the Clint comic anthology.
Murray also wrote the memoir Watching War Films With My Dad, published in 2013, and the serious narrative history books Command: How The Allies Learned To Win The Second World War and Arnhem: Black Tuesday: The Classic World War II Battle Told As Never Before.
- by Jay Richardson
