Booknotes: A Haunt of Fears by Martin Barker

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

by Martin Barker

Finished 2/26/20

Tells the story of the British Comic book panic of the 1950s, which, unlike its more famous US counterpart, ended in legislation and regulation.

I have a pretty good grasp of the history of American comics panics, which I largely got from David Hajdu’s “The Ten Cent Plague.” I didn’t know that an equivalent (and in some ways more successful) campaign occurred in the UK around the same time, though it had a very different trajectory, as Barker so astutely notes.

The first major difference was that there was not really a homegrown English comic press in the UK. So most comics came from the US as imports. For early critics of such comics, their US origin was part of what made them problematic. The first major group to criticize such comics was the British Communist Party (!) who decried their “thoroughly pernicious influence” on British youth. Thus, comics were a symbol of the invasion of foreign decadence into a polite British culture and values at a time when the communist party was pushing against internationalism and more towards internal, national growth.

The campaign was later taken over the Comics Campaign Council, which was an umbrella organization that included doctors and teachers (particularly members of the National Union of Teachers). Their criticisms would be more familiar to Americans, as they focused on the violence and crime themes of “horror comics.” However, there was less of an attempt by British campaigners to directly interrogate and critique the content of such comics; in other words, there was no equivalent to Frederic Wertham, the American psychologist whose book “The Seduction of the Innocent” codified a flawed but scientific-minded criticism of horror and crime comics. British Campaigners largely treated the problem as self-evident, though Barker goes to great lengths to show how crime and horror comics subverted the violent and horrific messages that campaigners thought they transmitted to child readers.

Finally, the last major difference is that unlike in America, the British Government responded with a law, the “Children’s and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act” of 1954, which made it illegal to publish crime or horror comics. (In America, the Kefauver hearings were called and might have led to regulation of the industry, but the creation of the industry-based Comics Code Authority pre-empted the need for such regulation). No one was prosecuted for the crime until 1970, and though the law is still on the books in the UK, there have been no subsequent prosecutions in the 21st century.

Barker, being a media-studies person, spends a lot of time analyzing the meanings of various crime and horror comics, especially the Bill Gaines/Jack Kamen masterpiece “The Orphan” from Shock Suspenstories, which is reprinted in full in the book. This was less interesting to me than the historical discussions of the actors involved in the campaign, many of which Barker interviewed personally. But Barker also locates comics panics within broader concerns about the rise of youth culture in the UK (and by extension the US as well) in the 1950s, and the anxieties it produced in middle-class and elite adult circles, of which this comics panic was one example.

A really fascinating study that complicated and broadened my understanding of the history of comic books.