Between 1949 and 1955 Britain was swept by a rising tide of panic
about "American-style" or "horror" comics. The British press cried
out in alarm: "Now Ban This Filth That Poisons Our Children,"
"Drive Out the Horror Comics." As one frenzied columnist protested:
"I feel as though I have been trudging through a sewer. Here is a
terrible twilight zone between sanity and madness . . . peopled by
monsters, grave robbers, human flesh eaters." A campaign against
ghoulish comic books climaxed in an Act of Parliament making it
illegal to publish or sell any material in comic form deemed to be
"harmful to children."
But behind the facade of concern for the protection of children,
another very different story lurked. This book explores the British
campaign by asking some rather different questions. Who were the
people at the heart of the anti-comics campaign? Why and how did
the British Communist Party come to play a central role, and yet
end up attacking a group of comics which were "on their side" in
assaulting their rationality of McCarthyism?
The British "horror comics" campaign reveals the inadequacy of
some conventional assessments of anti-media panics. In showing a
curious gap between the private concerns of the campaigners and
their public rhetoric, "A Haunt of Fears," originally published in
Britain in 1983, raises serious questions about the state of
British culture during this era.
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