Wheatley (2006) claims that the anthology structure resulted in two distinct types of tale: the understated ghost story (Radcliffe’s “terror”) and the effects-driven supernatural horror—and that these types were developed across literature, film, theatre and radio. The use of these two types of story structure in Spellbound and Misty seems a good starting point. Using a discrete random sample of 10% of the run of each comic (that is, 10 issues of Misty and 6 issues of Spellbound), I set out to evaluate the use of each story type, the construction of terror and horror, and the appearance of traditional motifs. Horror and terror both seem well-suited to the comics medium, whose stylised art and staccato panel structure lends itself well to horror’s grotesque image and the horrifying reveal. However, the medium also exploits terror’s imaginative potential as pivotal events can be obscured or omitted between panels. The reader is required to recognize, interpret and even create the story events by combining the shown panel content and the unshown contents of the “gutter” between panels in order to create a complete story.

My analysis of 6 issues of Spellbound reviewed 49 individual stories, of which just 12 (24%) could be defined as effects-driven horror (featuring living dolls, ghostly dragons, mummies, giant bats, a mask, and “a grotesque black cloud” (#37)). The remaining 37 stories (76%) contain no visible threat: mysterious events involve uncanny portraits, familiar-looking characters or overheard threats. Much of the tension is created through the protagonist’s suspicions or their perception of places and people as “sort of eerie” (#36).

The equivalent analysis of Misty across 10 issues (totalling 64 individual comics stories/instalments of serials) revealed that just 14 of these (22%) rely upon a monstrous image or effect to horrify (instances included skeletons, gorgons, spiders, sea demons, a fire, rats, snakes, beetles, melting waxworks, and zombies). The remaining 50 stories (78%) do not show anything that could be considered horrifying: although dramatic events and characters such as traffic accidents and witches feature there is no grotesquery or gore. Instead they raise tension through their narrative stance and by suggesting an impending doom: for example “Monster of Green Acres” (#85) in which a “madman” stalking the town is addressed throughout in second-person narration, before finally being revealed as a scarecrow who “didn’t know when to stop”. For those who, like Collings, remember Misty best for its shock story endings of grotesque transformation, these results are revealing. In fact, overall both titles shy away from showing horrifying images. Horror remains largely unshown and instead the tales terrify through the unseen and suggested.

I also conducted a content analysis of 12 (different) randomly selected issues of Spellbound (which represents 17% of the comic’s entire run) to see how often Gothic archetypes appeared in its comics content.Footnote 2 The total was extremely small, with mummies and witches being the only figures to appear. The serial “When the Mummy Walks” produced five instances of this figure, and various other serials produced a total of eight instances of witchery. Using these figures suggests that Gothic archetypes appear in just 14% of the total comics content of this title. In addition, it should be noted that all the instances I found in this sample came from the early weeks of the comic’s run, suggesting that in later issues the focus moves further away from established archetypes.

I also surveyed Misty’s entire run of stories4 against the average number of stories per issue to see how many times Gothic archetypes explicitly appear (Table 1). There are limitations to this method, as there are many other stories in Misty where ‘the dead’ are mentioned in more general terms, which I have not included. However it does give a sense of the weighting given to named Gothic archetypes in Misty—and reveals that these make up just 25% of its total comic strip content.

Table 1 Gothic archetypes in Misty Full size table

In both titles, then, Gothic archetypes appear less than might be expected. In addition, they are often treated in a subversive manner. As ghosts are a very wide category that can take many forms, I looked more closely at the treatment of the witch archetype, as this is an established figure with a well-defined generic purpose.

Roper (2012: 3) argues that the witch is “symbolically and psychologically capacious” and can be morally ambiguous despite her association with evil. He draws attention to the contradictions and tensions that frequently appear in images of witches, for example in between word and image in early woodcuts of executed witches (13) and (most often) in the “strange and uncanny” combinations of sagging age and nubile youth in many paintings, citing the work of Hans Baldung Grier (15). Through the witch the female body thus “becomes the focus of projections about evil, sexuality, envy and death” (18) and the stereotypical hag is a consequence of the witch’s artistic association with the figure of Envy.

Even in the horror and Gothic genres the witch is somewhat marginalized. Freeman (2016: 745–746) argues that, while witchcraft features heavily in early modern writing (folklore, children’s literature and fantasy), it appears less often in Gothic than male-dominated forms of black magic. In addition, when present in later texts, it is often modernized in some way (“in the service of ecology, feminism, spiritual renewal, and personal development”) and he notes that the “good witch” frequently appears in the Gothic film. The exclusive use of female witches in Spellbound and Misty thus redresses this gendered imbalance. In addition, the variety of ways that the figure is used in these titles sustains her flexibility, undermining superficial or fixed definitions.

The dominant witch figure in the issues of Spellbound that were analysed is Aunt Armida in “I Don’t Want to be a Witch!” (#1-#15, art by Norman Lee, writer unknown). Rather than an old hag she is a contemporary witch of the type that Freeman (2016: 746) claims was a “significant aspect of countercultural life in Britain” in the 1960s. Aunt Armida is beautiful, with flowing long black hair, and often shown dancing around a cauldron or fire. She is able to transform her own appearance and is in league with familiars. But although she holds the traditional narrative position of antagonist, her motivation is not evil. She wants to expose her niece Celia’s supernatural powers so that Celia will become a witch like her, which Celia does not want. However, Armida’s attempts are often trick-like rather than malevolent and her motivation can be read as female ambition rather than destruction.

While considering this type of witch we should also examine Misty’s fictional editor, who also fulfils this visual stereotype (see Fig. 1 above). Roper (2012: 6) points out that “Journeys featured, too, in the stories of witches’ flight” and that “the wildness of mountains and deserted landscapes […] became part of the iconography of witchcraft”. Misty’s appearances always picture her either in a natural wild environment (including the sea, as above, or a lake, forest, mountain, and so forth) or sometimes amongst ruins or rocks. However, it is not just the imagery that emphasizes these witchlike tropes. Misty’s welcomes are notable for drawing extensively on images of the body and the journey (see Round, 2018, forthcoming) as we are constantly urged to “walk” with her (as in the figure above), or to “journey”, “quest”, “venture”, “step” or “follow me” on a journey elsewhere. Despite this, she is a reassuring presence, signing off as “your friend” in over half of the inside cover greetings, and promising that “the followers of Misty will come to no harm” (#13).Footnote 3 Like Aunt Armida she is a powerful figure, but placed in the position of ally, and addressing the reader most often as a friend and equal: offering up stories for “our delight” rather than inflicting her ideals on us.

Within Misty’s entire run (of just over 600 stories), witches appear explicitly 21 times, and offer extreme variety.6 They can be placed into one of four categories: innocent victims or helpful forces (six instances); justified (if somewhat extreme) avengers (five instances); malevolent antagonists (seven instances); and protagonists who discover their own witch powers (three instances). In six instances they are innocent victims or helpful forces, as in “A Girl’s Best Friend” (#48) where blind Carla has her sight returned thanks to her dog’s sacrifice and with the help of Old Greta. Five of the tales have witches meting out justified (albeit extreme) revenge, such as “Elmo’s Revenge” (#32) in which Paula steals from her neighbour Old Wanda and in return Wanda takes over her body after a fall. In seven of the tales witches are malevolent antagonists: for example “What’s on the Other Side?” (#26), where a medieval witch travels to the future and traps disobedient Peggy on the other side of her TV. Finally, there are three stories in which protagonists discover their own witch powers, such as “Was it Just… A Game?” (#14) in which Nina is bullied at school and called a witch, but the denouement shows her enacting accidents (that come true) on all the bullies with her dolls. Within this last category, two of these three tales can also be classified as either witch as avenger (#14; #59) or witch as innocent victim (#21). This very brief list demonstrates that in over half these appearances witchcraft is either given some justification or the witches themselves are unfairly victimised. In addition, although the visual stereotype of an aged crone dominates in the stories where the witch turns out to be good, across the other tales they range from babies to old ladies. So Misty’s focus is on destabilizing the stereotype either visually or functionally and sustaining the archetype’s variety and duality.

“When the Mummy Walks” appears in Spellbound #1-#10 and is also more subversive than it initially seems. Mummies are a less obvious choice for a horror archetype, however the Egyptian mythology background to the story is completely undeveloped and all is not what it seems. Although the “Golden Priestess of Manaton” initially appears to be enacting a stereotypical standard mummy revenge by attacking members of the party of Egyptologists that raided her tomb, as the plot develops it is revealed that the mummy is controlled by Miss Brisson who is using it to steal the relics that were recovered. The mummy then ultimately takes its own revenge against Miss Brisson at protagonist Jenny’s urging. As Lorrsadmin (2015) points out, the real villain of the piece is Miss Brisson and so the mummy’s role throughout is really just misdirection. The story uses various locations such as graveyards, the museum at night, foggy streets and shadowy settings to create a compelling atmosphere of Gothic horror. Norman Lee’s art renders the mummy a terrifying (though shapely) figure with trailing bandages and blank eyes that nonetheless can kill. Again, it seems the Gothic trope is being subverted a little, as the mummy is a tool for mere theft and its abilities include non-standard skills (as in its stare of death).

Rather than outright horror, both titles rely primarily on uncanny events and suggested consequences. While Misty is harsher than Spellbound through its reliance on one-shot stories in which protagonists frequently come to a sticky end, both titles heap mysterious, frightening or downright unlucky events upon their protagonists. This continues the trend of the “slave” story so often found in the “dark wave” of girls’ comics. For example in “No Cheer for Cheryl” (Spellbound #36–#49) our protagonist undergoes a series of false accusations, bullying, struggles with school work and her own talents, all set against the backdrop of her mother’s increasing blindness. In “The Shop at Shudder Corner” (a portmanteau serial in which our protagonists enter the history of a different antique every week thanks to the magic glass in Sheila’s torch), Sheila and Jean are often thrown into scary or life-threatening situations despite their best efforts to “not use the torch on anything sinister-looking or nasty. I’ve had enough scares!” (#36)—in this tale they are taken to a deserted inn and nearly sucked into the pages of a mysterious book.

Both comics’ use of established horror and Gothic archetypes tends towards the subversive, and reader expectations are often exploited or inverted. Will Eisner (1985) claims that “it is inherent to narrative art that the requirement on the viewer is not so much analysis as recognition” (38) and with this in mind the deliberate inversion and misuse of established symbolism and archetypes seems odd. While horror is subversive and socially aware in a radical and political sense (Wisker, 2005), in these comics the subversive streak is also reflexive and comments ironically upon its own genre.Footnote 4 This may only be explainable by the presence of Gothic, whose tensions and contradictions frequently construct unreliable or paradoxical narratives and thwart expectations. The ways in which both comics exploit other visual markers of Gothic will now be discussed.