'little gothics': Misty and the 'Strange Stories' of British Girls' Comics.

Abstract

This article uses a critical framework that draws on the Gothic carnival, children’s Gothic and female Gothic to analyse the overlooked understudied spooky stories of British comics. It begins by surveying the emergence of short-form horror in American and British comics from the 1950s onwards, which evolved into a particular type of girls’ weekly tale: the ‘Strange Story.’ It then examines the way that the British mystery title Misty (IPC, 1978-80) developed this template in its single stories. This focuses on four key attributes: the directive role of a host character, an oral tone, content that includes two-dimensional characters and an ironic or unexpected plot reversal, and a narrative structure that drives exclusively towards this final point. The article argues that the repetition of this formula and the tales’ short format draw attention to their combination of subversion/conservatism and horror/humour: foregrounding a central paradox of Gothic.