Titles such as EC Comics' The Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt, and The Vault of Horror first arrived as ballast in ships from the United States, and at first were only available in the "environs of the great ports of Liverpool, Manchester, Belfast and London."
EC's comics, which exhibited a gruesome joie de vivre, with grimly ironic fates meted out to many of the stories' protagonists, prompted what in retrospect has been characterised as a moral panic.
Around that same time, in 1952 and again in 1954, "using blocks made from imported American matrices," ABC printed British single-issue editions of EC's The Haunt of Fear, Tales from the Crypt, and The Vault of Horror, selling them in "small back-street newsagents.
"[7] The ensuing outcry was heard in the British press; an article in The Times of April 22, 1955, accused horror comics of deranging young readers, pushing the most susceptible to desecrate local cemeteries.
Shortly, at the urging of the Most Reverend Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Major Gwilym Lloyd George, the Home Secretary and Minister of Welsh Affairs, and the National Union of Teachers, Parliament passed the Children and Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955.