Graphic Content: five questions for Robbie Morrison

As we approach Remembrance Sunday Graphic Content asked Robbie Morrison to talk about the story's origins and the crossover between fiction and history:

What was the origin of White Death?

White Death is set in Italy, in a little-known corner of World War One, which has recently been named "The White War". The Italian Front stretched across the borders separating Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The main battles were fought in mountain regions claimed by Italy, part of the Allied Powers, from Austria, allied to the Kaiser. They confronted each other in a conflict strategically similar to trench warfare, but played out in the treacherous heights of the Trentino, Dolomite and Caporetto mountain ranges. Amongst the soldiers on both sides, no weapon was more feared than the White Death, devastating avalanches deliberately caused by cannon fire, which - as relentless and remorseless as the war itself - consumed everything in their path. "White Death" is a slang term used to describe avalanches in French and Italian Alpine regions.

The idea for the story initially came from a TV documentary about avalanches. It quoted the chilling statistic that, on the Italian Front in the First World War, an estimated 60-100,000 troops were killed in avalanches deliberately caused by the enemy. To me this seemed to take the inhumanity of warfare to new extremes - turning nature itself into a weapon of war. In my head, the image of the avalanche became a metaphor for the war itself, this unstoppable, uncontrollable force that started from a fairly small incident - the assassination of a man that most people hadn't heard of - and escalated beyond all imagination into a conflict that decimated the world.

It was one of those story ideas that refused to go away, though I wasn't sure exactly what to do with it until Charlie got in touch. He'd been experimenting with a new art style that he thought might suit a historical project and asked if I had any ideas for a First World War story …

Did Charlie's approach to the art affect how you approached the writing?

Charlie's artwork - a haunting combination of charcoal and chalk on gray paper instead of the standard comic-book pencils and inks - seemed perfect for a story set in a frozen landscape of mountains and avalanches. I started work on the script - coincidentally while I was actually in Italy, taking the majority of the character's names from a First World War memorial in the town where I was staying - while Charlie produced preliminary sketches and visuals, including an incredibly powerful opening sequence. I knew after seeing the initial artwork that White Death was going to be something special, very different from anything either of us had done previously.

The basic mechanics of comic-book storytelling remain pretty much the same regardless of different styles of artwork, so I didn't take a radically different approach to the writing. In practical terms, to get the necessary level of detail into the artwork, Charlie had to work on a larger scale than normal and I had to write slightly less panels per page than normal. This gives the story a slightly different sense of pace, but seems to suit the subject matter and also allows the imagery to have a greater impact.

The one thing I do regret is that I had to cut a few sequences from my original outline. I had planned for our fictional characters to encounter real figures from the period, including Ernest Hemingway, who wrote A Farewell to Arms after his experiences as an ambulance driver in the same conflict, and Mussolini, who was a war correspondent on the Italian Front. Unfortunately, for reasons of time and space (and money, as the book was basically self-published first time around), I had to cut them out.

What sense of responsibility to the history of that time did you feel when writing the story?

While I am an advocate of never letting the facts get in the way of a good story on some occasions, but White Death certainly wasn't one of them. When you're dealing with something that cost so many lives, affected generations of families and changed the nature of world as it was at the time, I think you do have a responsibility to make it as historically accurate and as realistic as possible.

This was in the days before the internet was such a massive resource, so it meant lots of old-fashioned research - days and days in the Mitchell Library in my case, reading anything I could find on the subject, scrolling through microfiche and watching old documentary footage. A mix of research and imagination helped us to capture not only the grand spectacle of the high-altitude locations, the numbing reality of life in wartime, the desperation and brutality of hand-to-hand combat, and the thundering power of the avalanches, but also the subtler emotional interplay of the characters as they try to survive.

Certain aspects of the story grew out of the research. For instance, Pietro Aquasanta, the lead character, is first drafted into the Austrian Army, and then taken captive when Italy joins the war and "offered" the chance to fight in the Italian Army. He effectively ends up fighting on both sides, sometimes facing enemy soldiers who were once his comrades, which was something that happened frequently in the border regions.

Of all the projects I've worked on, White Death is possibly the one that remains closest to my heart. I'm immensely proud of the book and hope we manage to say something about the horror and futility of war, and the cruelty, compassion and camaraderie of those trapped within it. It's a dark tale that was produced not only with a passion for the material, but for medium of comics and what we think it's capable of.

Did the First World War touch on your own family?

No one that I would have met in my lifetime. I remember my Dad talking about my Great-Uncle Tommy, my Grandad Morrison's older brother, who enlisted when he was under age at 16 or 17. The Recruiting Officers asked if he had any experience of horses, and he said yes, he did. In fact he owned one. What he neglected to tell them was that it was the knackered old nag that pulled his fruit and veg cart, not some mighty stallion. He was assigned to the 5th Dragoons Cavalry Regiment. When the Cavalry attacked the German trenches on the Somme, they charged with swords drawn, only to be scythed down by the German machine-gunners. Great-Uncle Tommy survived, but was seriously wounded in the leg and invalided out of the army.

Most families would've been touched in some way by the First World War. From childhood, my Dad impressed upon me the importance of Remembrance Day, making sure we bought poppies. My partner, Deborah, was brought up to do the same (her parents were born in the early 1920s and her father fought in the Second World War). Her Great-Uncle, Vincenzo Risi/Vincent Rice, joined the British Army and was killed in action in the First World War, while his brother, Giovanni/John, took his life by jumping off the Tyne Bridge as he couldn't settle into civilian life after the war. On her Mother's side, three Great-Uncles (Irish-Scots) also fought.

Why do we still need to tell stories of the First World War 100 years on?

First off, it's all too easy to forget. As time passes, these earth-shaking events become less of a reality to each successive generation. The very fact that it was 100 years ago - and that no one who fought in the conflict now remains alive - is why we do still need to tell stories about it.

War encompasses the best and worst of human nature, and - in what appears to be an increasingly fractious world - perhaps we can learn some valuable lessons about how to live in our own times the bravery and sacrifices of ordinary people in the past.

White Death is published by Image Comics