A haunt of fears: The strange history of the British horror comics campaign by Martin Barker

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 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.

Martin Barker is Emeritus Professor at Aberystwyth University, UK. He is currently Principal Investigator on the international Hobbit project, exploring audience reactions around the world to Peter Jackson's films, as part of a larger exploration of the role of 'fantasy' in the lives of audiences.

Su Holmes is Reader in Television at the University of East Anglia, UK. She is the author of several books on British television, and co-editor of books including In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity (2011), and Women, Celebrity and Cultures of Ageing (2015).

Sarah Ralph is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Northumbria University, UK. She has published in Celebrity Studies, Participations and Critical Studies in Television, and has recently co-authored (with Martin Barker, Kate Egan and Tom Phillips) Alien Audiences: Remembering and Evaluating a Classic Movie (2015), a book based on an international audience study of Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780861047512
ISBN 10	0861047516
Title	A haunt of fears: The strange history of the British horror comics campaign
Author	Martin Barker
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Pluto Press
Year published	1987-01-01
Number of pages	384
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.