The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America | David Hajdu

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America | David Hajdu | A Dimly Remembered Pop Cultural Watershed

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The Ten-Cent Plagu...

	The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America David Hajdu Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 25 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The other 50s witch-hunt

While most people are well aware of McCarthyism, the tale of the persecution of comic-book writers by moral do-gooders and other pests remains unknown except to those who either lived through it, or younger comic-book fans that know their history. Hopefully, Hajdu's compelling new book will change all of that.

The book covers comic-books from the post World War 2 era to the late 50s, and describes the rise, reign and tragic fall (and neutering, under the 'Comics Code') of comic books as an industry, until their later revivals.

It was quite saddening to read of the numerous people who put their hearts and souls into their work, and how they were essentially forced out of their jobs and treated as social pariahs. The modern day attacks upon video-games mirror the attacks on comics in the 50s.

Hadju depicts comics as being the unsung hero in rebellion from established, conservative norms. While rock n' roll is often blamed for this triumph, he shows a very clear generational divide between parents and young adults over comic books as well, and the same arguments of 'morality,' taste and juvenile delinquency were applied to both. While Elvis shook his hips, kids were reading illustrated stories that frightened, excited and entertained them.

The ultimate question that The Ten-Cent Plague leaves us with is this: who is more fit to judge a child's reading diet - parents or busybodies?

One hopes that Kefauverism will join our lexicon just as McCarthyism has. He fought hard for that honor, and fully deserves it.

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A Dimly Remembered Pop Cultural Watershed

This is a great and entertaining work of pop culture journalism and sociology. I started reading this book out of a love for the history of comic books, and soon found that it was more a rigorous journalistic exploration of the Kefauver/Wortham hearings in 1954 in NYC that resulted in the creation of the Comics Code Authority. A whole book?? But as I read this well written account I was drawn into a story of censorship that gradually built to a crescendo of unease as Hajdu portrayed the political and personal agendas that resulted in the virtual demise of the comic book industry. The clinical depiction of a movement that resulted in mass comic book burnings by high school students and girl scout troops is creepy and hair raising, almost akin to reading about a country behind the Iron Curtain. But this was Eisenhower America !! Hajdu interviews some of these people as adults and you can hear how disturbed they were even at the time but felt swept along in the conformity movement by their parents and teachers.
From a comics history standpoint this book really highlights how devastating the climate was to the comicbook industry and explains why so many of the exotic companies and "brands "went out of business because of the enormous ill will and bad publicity that lingered even after the comics code was initiated. A huge number of creators left the industry never to return and the ones that stayed were afraid to reveal to anyone what they did as being in the comics industry was viewed as close to an admission of child molestation. The Hearings had an effect for many more years than I ever imagined. It is almost hard to believe that the industry survived and eventually grew to its current prominent influence in pop culture. The last chapter of this book is chilling to read in its depiction of the state of the industry after the years long witch hunts that were essentially victorious.
Comic books were not blameless in this story as many of the EC examples of horror and weird tales readily show. But the political and moral reaction of the 1950s to me was much more disturbing than the dilemma that it was addressing (juvenile delinquency ) thru attacking a simple and probably insignificant contributor ( comics ) to a much more complicated situation. The totalitarian tactics leveraged against comics by well meaning but simpleminded people including politicos and ministers and educators mirror the McCarthy Communist witch hunts of the times. This is a cautionary tale that deserved the spotlight given to it by David Hajdu's wonderful and disturbing book. A great and compelling read !

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Absorbing

Very readable, well written book. Anybody who read and enjoyed "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" should pick this up. My only criticism would be that the epilogue seemed a little short and forced.

Enjoyable History of a Dark Time for a Great American Art Form

I definitely enjoyed reading the book. While the "broad strokes" of the history it recounts are ones I mostly knew already, like Bill Gaines crashing on diet pills while testifying before Congress, the book is full of details from the various people who worked in the comics industry up through the Fifties, so the personal insights still made for interesting reading. Will Eisner, who, in my opinion, is second only to Jack Kirby as an artistic innovator for the medium, seems to have been a major source for Hajdu, so his comments were particularly welcome to me.

The book's subtitle of "The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America" seemed a little misleading to me, in that there's not much on how it changed America. There's a lot about how it changed the comics industry, of course (most notable, pretty much destroying EC Comics but for a little magazine called "Mad"), but I didn't see much about it changing America. Sure, I didn't expect "if there hadn't been a comic book scare, we wouldn't have gone to Vietnam!" or some such, but it would have been interesting to see, for instance, Hajdu speculating on how the comic book scare influenced the early television industry. It would have also been interesting to at least go a little into the Silver Age of Comics, and how the scare influenced the creators of that era, but the book pretty much ends with the establishment of the Comics Code.

Highly recommended for anyone who loves comic books, especially older ones, and hates censorship.

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An overlooked chapter in pop-culture history

When I think about all the uproar over the last few years over video game violence, about how they teach kids to kill and desensitive them, when I think of all the Jack Thompsons of the world suing game publishers for what they purport to do, I am still glad to know that it could be worse - far, far worse. Jack Thompson may be out there, but he never for one day held as much sway over parents and lawmakers as Fredric Wertham and Estes Kefauver held over America in 1955. While Joe McCarthy was busy hunting Commies, these two were going after the comics industry, at first just horror and crime comics, but pretty soon all comics, to them, were "crime" comics.

I've read a lot of comics history (Men Of Tomorrow being a great example), but this, to my knowledge, is the first book to look squarely on those few years post-WW II, pre-television when the Great Enemy was comics. Mind you, this was a time when super-heroes as a comic were a fading trend. The war made for some good hero stories, but the kids were looking for something new now, as were all those G.I.'s who read comics overseas. All of the familiar stories are here - M.C. Gaines' strange death, his son Bill helping to make E.C. Comics known for horror, the rise of romance, the launch of Mad, and of course the sub-committe hearings on the juvenile delinquincy,eventually to be associated with Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver.. Thankfully, Hadju , while giving more detail of that moment than most books, didn't just re-iterate every little nuance of the hearings. He did, however, bring a new dimension (and for me, a new hate) to Fredric Wertham, the pyschologist who wrote Seduction Of The Innocent, a book linking comic books to juvenile delinquency. He weaves a pretty good narrative of just how this man became so powerful in his opinions, and how he had the ear of almost every parent and city organization in the country.
The reason I say things could be far worse now with video games is that these guys actually had everyone so worked up, almost all the states were passing legislation banning the sales of most comics to almost anyone. A lot of times, they wouldn't even make it on the shelves! I also enjoyed seeing the exact origins of the Comics Code Authority, whose stamp on comics I was used to seeing most of my life (it's quietly been shuffled off now - DC Comics never uses it anymore, and Marvel has their own in-house ratings system). Yet read how the Authority worked, and what they looked for, and try to imagine that companies were still submitting their stories to these guys for approval as recently as five to ten years ago...that's how far-reaching the effects were.

The biggest revelation reading this book has to be the first part of the appendix: over fifteen pages, Hajdu lists more than 850 individuals - artists, writers, and others - who never again worked in the business after the crackdown on comics. I can't even begin to fathom that. That would basically be like the entire industry today just disappearing! It was also shocking, to me, to see just how many children went along with all these public book burnings (and so soon after WW II!). Many didn't even realize why they were doing it, but they felt they were doing something good because the PTA said so. As a co-worker of mine would say, there's a lot to anger up the blood in here.

"Naturally, with comic magazine censorship now a fact, we at EC look forward to an immediate drop in the crime and juvenile delinquency rate of the United States. We trust there will be fewer robberies, fewer murders, and fewer rapes!'
-Bill Gaines, Editor of EC Comics, in the final issues of all of EC's "New Trend" line of horror and crime comics. That's the kind of bitter sarcasm I expect from the guys who created Mad Magazine

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5

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