The strip rarely flinched from providing an extremely frank portrayal of the horrors of war, so much so that in some later reprintings some of the artwork was censored.
In addition to depicting Charley's own experiences of the war, the comic took the risk of going off on several tangents, temporarily shifting the focus to characters in different locations and time periods.
The first and most successful tangent was the story of 'Blue', a British soldier in the French Foreign Legion who fought with them at Verdun in 1916 before deserting and making his way back to England (where he meets Charley).
Another diversion was when the storyline turned to Charley's younger brother Wilf and his experiences as an observer/gunner in the Royal Flying Corps in early 1918.
However, the series ended in the early part of the Second World War after Charley is one of the lucky ones successfully evacuated from Dunkirk (along with his son), realising he is too old for soldiering any more.
The story ends with him wondering how he came to become a soldier in the first place, leading into a re-run of the strip within Battle Picture Weekly until that comic folded.
In reality, the ending of Charley's War was down to the poor health of Joe Colquhoun, which had already caused the strip to be delayed several weeks.
A working-class London lad from a close-knit family, he enlists in the British Army in 1916, age sixteen and arrives in the trenches on the Western Front shortly before the start of the Somme Campaign.
Naive and not too bright, Bourne nonetheless gets much hard-earned worldly wisdom as he experiences and survives the horrors of the Great War for the next three years and beyond.
Exceptionally brave, loyal to his comrades and quick to defend those who are suffering bullying or injustice, Bourne makes friends and enemies in equal numbers.
His fundamental decency and conscientious sense of duty are sometimes at odds with his anger at the many injustices of military life and his growing disillusionment over the conduct of the war.
Lonely A traumatised veteran who was the sole survivor of his platoon when it was wiped out in 1915 due to a recklessly cruel act by Lt Snell.
Charley reluctantly helps Blue to avoid capture whilst in Britain and later encounters him again during the infamous Etaples Mutiny in 1917.
The Scholar soon turns out to be a two-faced cunning snob who wrangles a transfer to officer training and he later returns as the platoon commander who thinly conceals his fear behind his pomposity and petty resentment of Charley.
Budgie A conscientious objector who has been forced into the army through torture and intimidation and works as a miner alongside Charley in 1917 employed to lay explosive mines beneath the German lines.
Oiley Oliver Charley's brother-in-law, he arrives at the front as a private during the Somme Campaign and soon proves to be a snivelling coward.
Kate A young nurse who lost her fiancé at Gallipoli in 1915 and who tends to Charley when he is hospitalised in early 1918 with an accidental self-inflicted wound.
Colonel Ziess Tough, brave and ruthless German officer who commands the veteran 'Judgement Troopers' and launches a deadly counter-attack on the Somme against the sector where Charley's platoon is located.
Archie Bentall and Cyril 'Handy' Hordle Cut off from their unit like Charley and Wattsie, they join up and escape the attacking German Army in a Bren Carrier they find in a barn.
The four have various adventures during the retreat from Belgium until Wattsie is crippled by Panzer fire, and later Handy is killed and Charley wounded by German sniper Heinrich Horst.
An omnibus edition of the first three volumes was published in paperback by Titan in 2014: In 2018 Rebellion began another series of Charley's War reprints in its Treasury of British Comics imprint.