A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign

by Martin Barker

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 “Now Ban This Filth That Poisons Our Children,” “Drive Out the Horror Comics.” As one frenzied columnist “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.

Genres: Comics, History, Horror, Nonfiction, Cultural

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Bill Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

A splendid book about the English war on American horror comics in the 1950s, a war that is more than just an echo of the Wertham campaign in the states. Barker gives a clear explanation of how the English concerns differed from those in the US and presents convincing argument that the English Communist Party was the first organized group to object to the decadent yankee culture threatening the youth of Britain. What the author also does brilliantly is provide an analysis of the critics' primary examples of bad comics -- notably the Feldstein/Kamen tale "The Orphan" -- showing how a certain mindset could turn a story completely inside out. I think everyone who has tried to come to grips with the attack on comics, and especially on EC comics, has had the feeling that Wertham and his cronies completely missed the point of the comics they were attacking, blinded by their prejudices. Barker proves the case. A strong contender for the best study of comic censorship written to date.