US Edition 
Comics Unmasked: Anarchy in the UK, British Library
From Oz Magazine to V for Vendetta, British comics have been wildly subversive, as a new British Library exhibition shows
Long before the activist group Anonymous took as its symbol the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta by Dave Lloyd and Alan Moore, comics in Britain were sowing moral panic, conjuring utopian visions, expressing solidarity and protesting for social change.
From the banned Sixties magazine Oz to the religion-baiting webcomic Jesus and Mo, from the 19th-century Illustrated Police News to the superhero satire Watchmen, and from the Beano to Viz, the UK’s comics creators have delighted in sedition and anarchy, exploring their medium’s outsider status to dramatise the changing faces of society, with outrageous and often thought-provoking results.
Next month their efforts become the subject of the British Library’s spring exhibition, Comics Unmasked: Art and Anarchy in the UK, which draws on the library’s extensive archive of graphic art to peer deep into centuries of controversy and political engagement. “The British have always loved an anti-hero, ever since Robin Hood,” explains the comics writer John Harris Dunning, one of the show’s curators. “There’s always been an underground stream of seditious material in British comic books. It’s all about anti-heroes, tearing down the establishment.”
The capacious basements of the British Library building at St Pancras contain the largest public-access collection of comics in Britain, but while tangential exhibits in the show reach back to the 15th and 16th centuries, the real treasures, Dunning explains, are in the selection of British comics dating to the Victorian period.
Announcing the exhibition earlier this year, the library’s chief executive explained that “we haven’t necessarily devoted to that sector of our collection the scholarly and curatorial effort we’ve devoted to some of the higher culture parts”. After months foraging and stack-diving, Dunning clearly agrees. “I felt like Indiana Jones,” he says. “We kept finding things we’d never heard about that hadn’t been recorded. The subject is wide open for people to research and make discoveries in.”
Emerging blinking into the light on May 2 will be hundreds of artworks, posters, manuscripts and drawings that showcase episodes from across the history of comics in Britain. They run from a notebook belonging to the Elizabethan wizard John Dee to Sally Heathcote: Suffragette, a “graphic docudrama” by Bryan Talbot, Mary Talbot and Kate Charlesworth that is published the day the exhibition opens.
The language of outrage, it becomes instantly clear, has accompanied comics since the beginning. A desperate jeremiad from 1890, in which the journalist Francis Hitchman inveighed against the illustrated papers and penny-dreadfuls of his day, has ironically given us an excellent picture of 19th-century popular literary culture. “No boy is likely to be the better,” thundered Hickman, for reading The Boy’s Comic Journal; while the pictures of gory crimes in the Illustrated Police News “minister to the morbid craving of the uneducated for the horrible and repulsive”.
Hickman’s rhetoric is strikingly familiar to that deployed in the run-up to the Harmful Publications Act of 1955, when the Church of England forged an unlikely alliance with the British Communist Party to lobby for a ban on the sale of blood-curdling titles such as Vault of Horror and Tales from the Crypt. Winston Churchill and the House of Lords were given armfuls of comics, the Lord Chancellor condemned “a clear and obvious immoral evil” and the ban went through.
The British scene, however, thrived on restriction. As the exhibition will show, with American publications such as Tales from the Crypt taken off the shelves, other home-grown authors stood poised to fill the gap they left in the imaginations of bloodthirsty youth.
The short-lived but immensely popular Action made a name for itself by creating blood-soaked rip-offs of US cinema nasties: Jaws became Hook Jaw, Rambo became Blackjack, Dirty Harry became Dredger. Pat Mills and John Wagner, Action’s founders, went on to create the influential sci-fi anthology 200AD. With its anarchic spirit and politically literate world-view, the magazine launched the careers of some of Britain’s best-known contemporary comics writers, including Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Grant Morrison, Neil Gaiman, Brian Bolland and Garth Ennis.
In the underground comics of the Sixties and Seventies, meanwhile, the medium’s latent tendencies to social subversion came to a head. Sexuality, race, class and politics became the new subjects and targets of a British comics scene that was invigorated by the satire boom of the period and the gradual collapse of social boundaries.
Graphic artists became mainstays of countercultural magazines such as International Times and the unfortunate Oz, whose editors were prosecuted for obscenity in 1971.
Independent comics soon became a forum for radical debate. In 1988, the cream of comics artists opposed the Thatcher government’s anti-gay Clause 28 in the comic anthology Artists Against Rampant Anti-Government Homophobia (AARGH), while the fascinating Breaking Free portrayed Hergé’s Tintin as a hooligan, racist and bum who discovers redemption as a working-class hero and anti-government striker.
In the same decade, the zine movement emerged from the music scene and became a powerful force in small-press comics that continues in the self-published work and the webcomics of the present day.
Not all comics have been revolutionary or progressive in theme, however, particularly when it comes to race and gender. The exhibition also shows Enid Blyton’s sigh-inducing short comic Mandy, Mops and the Whitewash, in which a black boy asks a painter to whitewash his face so he can “look beautiful”.
But the growing history of opposition to British racism is also reflected in the development of comics, as is much of the country’s contemporary ethnic experience, even if, as the curators disappointedly admit, “several British minorities,” including British Asians, “remain all but invisible” in the scene.
The similarly complex question of gender politics has an equally long and chequered history in comics, one that stretches from Hogarth’s Harlot’s Progress to the tender female eroticism of Sacha Mardou and Melinda Gebbie and the influential gay comics of Bill Ward and Zack — via, of course, plenty of stereotype, titillation and objectification.
The exhibition honours a narrative form whose artistic qualities Britain has been slower than its neighbours to acknowledge. “Seeing more and more European comics creators, curators, librarians and collectors,” says Dunning, “I started to realise that British artists and writers are some of the most highly regarded and most important in the world, with no respect at all within the literary or art establishments in the UK.
“I felt it was strong to fight that corner: to hit home the idea that comics are an art form equal in every way to literature and the visual arts.”
It’s no accident that the exhibition’s opening coincides with May Day, the yearly festival of vitality, subversion, social awareness and change. Comics growing in popularity by the year, and this is a superb time to celebrate their wild, vibrantly coloured and gloriously disruptive history.