Rodge Glass and Dave Turbitt on Dougie's War

The title is a reference to the classic comic Charley’s War, a surprisingly well-written comic story by Pat Mills that started in the late seventies, but was about a soldier in the First World War. However, this is a contemporary tale, focusing on Dougie Campbell, home from Afghanistan but still haunted by his experiences there. Rodge tells me “the core of the story that I kept hearing again and again was ‘we don’t have a voice’. It’s very difficult to settle back into civilian society, very difficult to feel like you’re being remembered or appreciated and it’s tough to be able to deal with having been, as one of the interviewees said, turned into a killing machine and then expected to go to Tesco’s.” It’s a serious piece, and in keeping with that, the book also includes important bonus material, such as interviews with veterans, photographs specially taken from Afghanistan, and even some contacts for veterans who would like assistance.

At its core though, Dougie’s War is the story of a specific man. Dougie Campbell is fictional, but his story is drawn from various real-life sources. Dave Turbitt says “The thing that I wanted to draw when I started compiling this thing, and yes there were the big war scenes and explosions, but the important thing was about trying to get the people across, the characters of the leads.” And though it’s set in modern times, it’s sad to note that, as Rodge Glass says “we’re talking about a number of conflicts over a long period of time, including all the interviews that deal with people who’ve had experiences in very, very different conflicts over many, many decades.” Turning this into a story was a challenge, but Glass found he could “find a thread that was really common in the interviews I did with lots and lots of guys, regardless of the conflicts they’d been in.”

This didn’t just extend to experiences of PTSD, but also to the reasons people joined up. “A lot of what we came up against both in interviewing much older guys who are veterans, and also people who’d left really quite recently,” Glass says, “was that a significant number of them felt like they didn’t have many other opportunities. Now I’m not saying people shouldn’t join up, but I’m saying that any decision of that scale that you make has to be because you want to go towards something, not because you want to run away. It’s no coincidence that many of the places that have large recruiting numbers are pretty deprived areas.” Despite the author’s views on this issue, the book isn’t judgemental about the War in Afghanistan itself. It avoids preaching (for either war or peace) to look at a specific human problem, and how it affects Dougie Campbell.

Dave Turbitt lives in London, and Rodge Glass in Glasgow, so their working relationship was a modern one, benefiting greatly from technology. Turbitt is originally from Glasgow, but when down south he found Google Street View invaluable. “Although I remember what [for example] Buchanan Street Bus Station looks like, actually knowing for real, I needed the details. As a reference it’s brilliant, and I got loads of stuff that way.” And other modern technology helped too. “I was also working a lot with my camera phone,” Dave says, “taking pictures of the sketches I’d done, sending it through to Rodge, saying 'What about this for Dougie, what about this for his sister?' and getting a reaction that way. And so it was a very invaluable part of the tool kit.”

As far as the human aspect of collaboration goes, it seems like as smooth a collaboration as can have been expected. “Dave and I have a lot in common,” says Rodge Glass, “we’re both quite frantic, we both anguish over the tiniest little details, but are both incredibly enthusiastic about absolutely everything.” Despite the serious nature of the book, the artist and the writer seem to have enjoyed working together, which, in turn benefited the project as a whole. Or as Turbitt says, “Working with Rodge is sometimes a bit of a challenge to find where we actually agree on a topic. Sometimes the things I think up aren’t what Rodge had in mind, and part of the fun of putting Dougie’s War together was that we had to go through a lot of things like that, and we ended up with, I think, a really good book in the end.” Judge for yourselves. [Keir Hind]