Horror Hosts in British Girls’ Comics.

Abstract

Many definitions of Gothic suggest a contradiction or internal tension, and this chapter explores this notion using analysis of the host figures of British girls’ comics. It draws on extensive archival research to identify, survey, and compare these characters: demonstrating how early authoritative and patriarchal hosts give way to more diverse figures, and arguing that these fall into two distinct types (serial and series). These hosts can raise questions, provide explanations or morals, interfere with plot events, step in and out of the storyworld, and break the borders between the text and paratext. The chapter concludes that they are liminal figures, who problematize the boundaries between fiction and reality, and that the subversive freedom of the comics medium allows them a range of transgressions that epitomise the tensions and contradictions of Gothic.