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Book Review: British Comics: A Cultural History

Ian Gordon
Cultural Sociology 2012 6: 488
DOI: 10.1177/1749975512458626

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458626
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CUS6410.1177/1749975512458626Cultural SociologyBook Reviews

Cultural Sociology

Book Reviews
6(4) 488­–495
© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1749975512458626
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James Chapman
British Comics: A Cultural History
Reaktion Books, London, 2011, £25 hbk (ISBN-13: 978 1861898555), 303 pp.

Reviewed by: Ian Gordon, National University of Singapore, Singapore

There is much to like about James Chapman’s book. The work spans the late 19th century
to the early 21st. He gives a potted history of British comics and offers some more
detailed analytical set pieces on specific comics. Nonetheless, the work has some
limitations.
The first chapter of the book disposes of the pre-Second World War history of British
comics in 20 pages of text and eight of illustrations. Chapman gives a short account of
the shifting fortunes and social function of the lead character in the eponymous Ally
Sloper, one of the first comic strips in the world. He discusses the rise of the Amalgamated
Press on the back of Comic Cuts and touches on D.C. Thomson and their two main com-
ics, Beano and Dandy. He rounds the chapter off with a glimpse of the popular Second
World War strip Jane. However, it would have been good to have a few more words on
Beano and Dandy in place of the three pages of Jane illustrations.
Chapman gets to the ‘golden age of British comics’ (p. 75) in the next two chapters,
where he deals with the establishment of The Eagle, its lead feature Dan Dare and the
many competitors in the field of boys’ adventure comics. He gives a brisk account of the
anti-comic campaign in the 1950s, the Christian origins of The Eagle and Dan Dare, and
changes in the publishing industry, including the consolidation of comics’ publishers
under the IPC corporation in the early 1960s. Chapman sets the advent of 2000 AD and
its star character, Judge Dredd, in the context of the continuing popularity of Second
World War comics and the launch of Warlord and Battle in the mid 1970s by Thomson
and IPC respectively. These two comics along with IPC’s Action set the stage for 2000
AD. Chapman’s discussion of these comics and their content is on the whole engaging,
as are his chapters on British superheroes, alternative comics, and the Viz phenomenon.
Chapman is most convincing when he deals with British boys’ adventure comics. His
chapter on girls’ comics is rather anaemic and it is odd to read a discussion of these com-
ics that does not deal with the scholarship of Angela McRobbie on Jackie, even if only
to point to areas of disagreement, as Martin Barker has done. Chapman hints that the
renewed availability of American comics in Britain in 1959 changed the dynamics of
British comics but does not address this satisfactorily (p. 178). Although IPC consoli-
dated a number of publishers under a single umbrella, it was not until the late 1960s that

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Book Reviews 489

the separate divisions were rationalized. In the mid 1960s the Olhams division published
a line of comic books with titles like Wham, Pow, and Smash. These comics combined
British content, by former Beano artist Leo Baxendale, with reprints of American mate-
rial. These comics suggest that American comics posed significant problems for British
publishers to the extent that they tried to contain that threat by incorporating it into their
fare and catching readers as they made the transition from children’s comics to adoles-
cent comics. When that effort failed, it seems that British publishers had to look for other
models to address the American threat. These industry machinations better explain the
context of something Chapman pointed to: ‘the American influence on 2000 AD can be
seen as a strategy to attract readers of American comic books’ (p. 149). Entitling the book
British Comics in the absence of a sustained discussion of Beano and Dandy, two of the
four British comics in continuous publication along with 2000 AD and Judge Dredd, is
at the very least a poor title choice. In the introduction he does at least acknowledge a
bias towards boys’ adventure comics over funnies and girls’ comics (p. 14).
Chapman makes some stunning errors. He for instance thinks that most American
comic books like Detective Comics were published quarterly in the 1930s and 1940s
(p. 10), when in fact both the latter and Action Comics were published monthly. G.I. Joe
was not a 1950s war comic but a toy introduced in 1964 (p. 82). He confuses two differ-
ent Captain Marvels, the Fawcett character in the 1940s and the Marvel Comics charac-
ter in the 1960s (p. 104). Wonder Woman did not fight Nazis as Chapman thinks (p. 172).
Stan Lee was not an artist but a writer (p. 174). Riot Grrrls were not a band but a social
movement associated with the band Bikini Kill who did not, as he thinks, dress akin to
the title character of the Tank Girl strip (p. 236). This discomfort with things American
may explain his blind spot in understanding a contributing cause of transformation in
British comics.

Nancy Berns
Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us
Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 2011, £16.99 (ISBN-13: 978-1439905777), xiii + 214 pp.

Reviewed by: Tony Walter, University of Bath, UK

‘Closure’ has been a fashionable word in the USA since the early 1990s, and since the
middle of the 2000s I have begun to hear it over here in the UK too. Whether the word
has spread yet, either in English or in translation, to other European countries, I do not
know. Anyway, I have long been puzzled quite what the word means, why people use it
and how it came to enter popular discourse, not least as the word is not found in academic
literature on loss and grief. So I looked forward to reading Nancy Berns’ sociological
tour of this little piece of contemporary American culture. Hers is a book that was just
waiting to be written.
Berns employs two analytical tools familiar to readers of Cultural Sociology – feeling
rules, and social constructionism. More specifically, she shows that closure provides a
new language for talking about feelings associated with loss and grief. And she uses
Goffman’s concept of framing: closure is ‘a frame used to explain how we should respond
to loss’ (p. 4).

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