Reposted by James C. Taylor
June is shaping up to be a busy month for comics studies, so we’ve enlisted the help of a couple super friends to help us get into the convention spirit! 📚🦇🦸
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#ComicsStudies #MSComicCon #Batman #Superman
![Exhibition wall showing title: FEAR IN THE BEDROOM. B+W illustration shows a bed with a zombie teddy on top and monster hands stretching out from underneath. Text below reads:
"The relationship between childhood and horror has persisted throughout the history of youth culture, from fairy tales and nursery rhymes to the ongoing popularity of Halloween and recent worldwide phenomena like Five Nights at Freddy’s and Stranger Things. It takes the form of short stories, television series, films, books, magazines, comics, toys, music, video games and much more. For today’s youth, who are growing up in an age characterised by anxiety and instability, horror has the potential to help them understand the world around them, other people, and themselves. However, in the past, the meeting of children and horror has consistently attracted controversy due to unsupported perceptions that the genre is a harmful influence upon children and young people.
This exhibition is set up in the form of a child’s bedroom in the golden age of horror-related and horror-adjacent children’s ephemera from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. Despite ongoing debates about children’s access to horror, this 30-year period was one of plenty for the young horror fan, providing a myriad of products and memories, many of which are gathered here in this display.
The exhibition is not so much envisaged as a snapshot of a bedroom at a given moment in a given year, but rather as a time-capsule of children’s horror media in this period, an assembled archive collection of horror-themed products aimed at children in which objects, images and audio-visual items from the 70s rub shoulders with those of the 80s and 90s. This exhibition takes viewers through the history of children, youth and horror media, engaging visitors in the multifaceted world of horror through the eyes of a child. [continued in next image]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:pcolnff5buffwu4g65q2ubfj/bafkreifox33tofzwazxiwpod4ozir7pxqzxyiuza5j4ckwyhzuw6zush5i)
![[continued form previous] "We invite our visitors to consider the relationship between innocence, play and horror that these exhibits encompass, to bathe nostalgically in their own memories of items both here and absent, and perhaps to introduce a new generation to horror toys, books and games of the past.
Beyond the controversies that have categorised the relationship between youth and horror, our aim is to offer a space of reflection in which we see horror imagery and iconic monsters removed from the narrative contexts of the films or shows which they inhabit and reconfigured as figures of play or pleasure. These sources of horror populated many bedrooms across the UK in these 30 years, sparking the imagination and creativity of young people in the most impactful and fondly remembered ways.
This exhibition is intended for all ages, but some of the items and images on display might cause distress in younger children. Parents and guardians are advised to exert caution.
You’re welcome to interact with the exhibits, but please return them to where you found them so that other people can enjoy them, too.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:pcolnff5buffwu4g65q2ubfj/bafkreicigrr7ofhyd6qcwkqzkt3wrqqdncnxydjgiqgf3ntjajj4hjnr64)
