The Last Time I Saw Tommy was originally published back in 87, in "Grunts #1" (and only) from Mirage,.. They didn't originally plan it as a One-Shot but that's more or less how it turned out... I mean, at that point in time, who would've expected that the Turtle Guys could've done anything that flopped..?? I certainly didn't... Of course later on one of 'em put together a whole publishing company that seemed to do nothing but projects that didn't sell,.. So Who Knew,.?!? But Grunts was before all that and I am quietly proud to have been part of one of their first major fiascoes...
But that aside, the story itself is a bit of doggerel concerning generic death in the trenches of World War I... My Grandfather went overseas with the 1st Canadian Expeditionary Force and fought in Flanders,.. By the time he arrived there, the old British Professional Army was but a memory and Kitchner's "New Armies" had been ground up on the Somme, more & more Britain was depending on the Dominions for recruits to throw into the bloody meat grinder of the Western Front... From time to time I wonder how it was for him and how he might have felt on that 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 when the Armistice was declared and those who were left realized they had survived one of the bloodiest most Gawd-Awful wars in the history of mankind...
My Grandfather was not a terribly literate man, his surviving letters don't really tell one much... But at one time I thought that if he had jotted down any notes this poem might be the type of thing he or some other soldier could've written... Perhaps, Perhaps not... Probably not... But somebody wrote it, and while my name is on it as author I don't really feel as though I should take credit for being any more than a conduit... The whole thing just sort of came to me as though it were being whispered in my ear,.. I jotted it down as quickly as possible, originally there were nine verses, but to fit into the page layout I only needed 8, so discarded the most repetitive one... and that was it... It probably took only slightly longer to jot it all down than it's taken you to read this...
And that's about it,.. I penciled the Pages, Dave Garcia Inked and did the shaded pencil, the idea being to try and approximate the grainy gray look of W.W.I photographs... It was published, the book folded and now it's here on the Web... With any luck a few more people might read it than did the first time around... It seems every generation must repeat the mistakes of those generations that came before and "The War to End All Wars" was but a sham, Today we're bombing Iraq, tomorrow it will be someone else, it seems since the beginning of recorded history, marked by the invention of writing around 4000 BC, the history of mankind has been one bloody shambles after another... We don't seem to have changed much over all that time, we've just gotten more efficient at the killing... So how many times does Tommy Atkins have to die..? How many little Girls & Puppy Dogs do we need to blow up before we realize it's all a bloody waste..??
I don't know... I really don't... JQ