HORROR COMICS
The fears expressed by Mr. Joyce Cary in last • week's , Spectator have been echoed by a number of speakers in the Commons debate on horror comics, and by Mr. A. P. Herbert in a cogent letter to The Times. The Government's Bill has two defects : that it tries to deal with children's comics exclu- sively, instead of dealing with all types of obscenity in a single comprehensive measure; and that it is too loosely phrased. Would any publisher dare to bring out a children's book on the pattern of Struwelpeter, or some of Grimm's fairy tales, or even of 'the three blind mice'? It is questionable whether any legal phraseology can be found that will give general satisfac- tion, in spite of the fact that there is no great divergence in principle on the Bill. But at least in the committee stage a fight should be made to protect children from the diet of literary bread and milk, to which the Bill as it stands, if it were enforced, might condemn them. And this danger, inci- dentally, might not be confined .to children's comics
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