Introduction
Comics have not yet arrived in the way that films and television
have, accepted as a rational amusement for adults and a proper
subject for academic study. Comics are still liable to be
dismissed wholesale as trash, appropriate for weak or underdeveloped
minds, and probably detrimental. Curiously enough
much the same was said of the drama in Shakespeares day and
of the novel in Jane Austens time.
Paul Dawson.
T he comic strip, in Britain at least, has not been afforded even the grudging critical respect extended to other forms of popular visual culture such as films and television. This is not the case elsewhere. In France, for example, comics have long been accepted as a legitimate form of entertainment for children and adults alike, and the bande dessine (literally
In Britain, however, comics remain beyond the pale, and scholarly attention has been thin on the ground. The work of Martin Barker and Roger Sabin represents the only sustained academic engagement with comics in Britain. I shall return to As Lindsay Anderson wrote in 1949:
As, geographically, Britain is poised between continents, not quite Europe, and very far from America, so from certain points of view the British cinema seems to hover between the opposite poles of France and Hollywood. Our directors and producers never or rarely have the courage to tackle, in an adult manner, the completely adult subject: yet they lack also
The British comic, similarly, has never achieved the cultural cachet of the bande dessine, but nor has it found a popular mythology equivalent to the American superhero tradition.
How can we explain the lack of critical interest in British comics? One reason is the view, perhaps more prevalent in Britain than
Here there is a marked contrast with European comics, where it has been common practice
Another barrier to taking comics seriously has been the perception, still widespread, that comics are only for children. The popular historiography of British comics privileges the classic tradition exemplified by hardy perennial favourites such as Dandy
In Britain, furthermore, the cultural status of comics has undoubtedly suffered from their association with America. A distaste for all things popular and American has long been a characteristic of intellectual culture in Britain, evident on both the intellectual left and the intellectual right, and there is nothing manifestly both more popular and more American than comic books. In The Uses of Literacy, for example, Richard Hoggart lamented the Americanization of British culture and pointed the finger at comics in particular:
At the lowest level this is illustrated in the sales here of the American or American-type serial-books of comics, where for page after page big-thighed and big-bosomed girls from Mars step out of their space-machines, and gangsters molls scream away in high-powered sedans. Anyone who sees something of Servicemens reading, of the popularity
The view that American comics were polluting the minds and corrupting the morals of their British
However, there are counter arguments in response to each of these points. Against the low critical status of British comics we can set the fact that Britain can claim talent to match the best in the world. There will never be critical consensus as to the best comic strip artist: individual styles and different national traditions are simply too diverse to allow meaningful comparison. But many (including myself) maintain that Frank Hampson deserves a place in the pantheon: the sheer visual imagination of his strip Dan Dare Pilot of the Future, which he drew for the boys paper Eagle in the 1950s, has rarely been equalled. In comic fandom, moreover, British writer Alan Moore enjoys a particularly privileged reputation. To a greater degree than any other writer, Moore is regarded as having brought a level of psychological complexity and critical respectability to the comic book through an extensive body of work that includes Miracleman, V for Vendetta, Watchmen and From Hell all landmarks in the history of the medium. It seems something of a paradox that a nation where comics have been so marginalized has nevertheless produced one of the most acclaimed artists and by common consent the most influential modern comic writer.
Against the supposedly ephemeral nature of the medium we can set the fact that many British
The view that comics are only for children, moreover, does not stand up to scrutiny. The first comics to appear in Britain in the late nineteenth century were intended primarily as leisure reading for adults; only later, as publishers realized they were also widely read among children, were comics geared specifically towards younger readers. And, even if most comics have been intended for juveniles, the letters pages of boys papers such as Eagle and Battle provide anecdotal evidence that they were also read by fathers, uncles and elder brothers. Furthermore, there has been a long tradition of comics for adult readers, from the radical, underground comix of the 1970s to the emergence of more mainstream titles in the 1980s including Warrior, Crisis, Deadline and Revolver. The work of contemporary British comic writers such as Pat Mills, Alan Grant, Alan Moore, Steve Moore, Peter Milligan, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Warren Ellis and Garth Ennis demonstrates a level of emotional maturity and intellectual sophistication that indicates an assumed adult readership.
As for their association with American popular culture, this is to ignore the fact that it was in Britain that the first comics appeared. The consensus among comic historians is that Ally Slopers Half-Holiday (18841914) was the first modern comic in that it featured picture strips and a recurring character. The British comic really took shape in the 1890s with Alfred Harmsworths Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips, which established the style and format of the medium for a generation. In America the history of comics took another direction with the advent of newspaper strips such as The Yellow Kid (1896) and Krazy Kat (1913). The first American comic books in the 1930s were reprints of newspaper strips Funnies on Parade and Famous Funnies were the first but it was towards the end of the decade that superheroes and crime-fighters emerged into the popular consciousness through titles such as Action Comics (where Superman made his debut in 1938) and