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Published in:
2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
4. How Genres Emerge: Horror Comics
Author : Nicolas Labarre
Published in: Understanding Genres in Comics
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
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Abstract
This chapter examines the emergence of the horror genre in comics in the 1940s and 1950s. It argues that the hearings of the US Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency, in 1954, codified and enshrined generic discourses which had not fully coalesced until that point. In particular, publishers sought to distinguish between “horror” and “the weird,” which they described as more respectable and literary, in order to defend their own practices, while the two labels were perceived and used as differences of degrees up to that point. The chapter also argues that the potency of this moment of genre definition led to an unusual stability of the horror genre in the following three decades.