World Famous Comics: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
By: David Hajdu Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 448 Publication Date: March 18, 2008 Release Date: March 18, 2008
In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created—in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress—only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine.
The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told—until The Ten-Cent Plague. David Hajdu’s remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority.
When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how—years before music—comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers.
The Ten-Cent Plague radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between “high” and “low” art. As he did with the lives of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington (in Lush Life) and Bob Dylan and his circle (in Positively 4th Street), Hajdu brings a place, a time, and a milieu unforgettably back to life.
Amazon.com Review: Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: I may be alone here, but when I read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a whole strata of American artists came to life for me. Ever since then I've been waiting for a book like David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague to come along and show me the contours of this world. Anyone who remembers Positively 4th Street will recognize in this new book Hajdu's peerless ability to weave first-person recollections with an acute perspective of America at a pivotal moment in its cultural timeline. The rise of comics as a mode of expression, an outlet for entertainment, and, rather tragi-comically, as a target for censorship, couldn't be more compelling in anyone else's hands. In deft narrative strokes Hajdu creates a colorful, character-driven story of our first real--and lasting--counterculture (if the burgeoning popularity of graphic novels is any indication) and shows why we embrace it still.--Anne Bartholomew
Reads Like a Draft I first learned of this book through an interview with the author on NPR. The interview was very interesting, and I knew that I had to get The Ten Cent Plague on my reading list.
Unfortunately, I found this book a profound disappointment. I'll lead off by saying that TTCP isn't a bad book, it just wasn't nearly as good as I thought it would be. The book has rather slow, awkward pacing, and many of the anecdotes sound so similar that the book gets rather monotonous during the middle section.
My biggest critique of the book, however, is that it doesn't deliver on the second part of the subtitle: "How It Changed America." By the end of the book, the reader isn't left with much of an impression as to how the story really did change America. We're not even left with much of an impression about what many in the comic book industry thought, since the author focuses most of his attention on a single company (EC Comics) to the exclusion of nearly everything else.
The epilogue and appendix are especially disappointing. After 300 pages, I expected the epilogue to tie Hajdu's story back in with contemporary America. Instead, the reader is treated to a self-indulgent, worthless snippet whose only point was to let everyone know that Hajdu managed to get an interview with Robert Crumb. Even though I like Crumb (and loved the documentary), he's hardly a stand-in for American culture.
Hajdu also treats the reader to an appendix that's a massive list of those "who never again worked in comics after the purge of the 1950's," which might lead the prospective buyer to think that he's about to read a story akin to the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era. The problems here are two-fold: first, there was no official "purge," in the McCarthy sense; comics as an industry, rather than individual artisans, were targeted. People lost jobs from companies that closed, not because of any attack directed toward targeted individuals.
Dwight Eisenhower's glum picture is even featured prominently on the cover, suggesting he was somehow involved in the "Great Comics Scare." Eisenhower is mentioned twice in the text, both times in passing.
Second, Hajdu treats the vast majority of these people as names on a page. Those that are actually mentioned in the text are often mentioned only in passing.
We're never really treated to a good discussion as to why some comics survived (Superman, Batman, etc.,) that were under fire, while others did not. It's taken that, if you're reading the book, you know those made it while others didn't and no more need be said. We're also not really treated to much discussion about what the lack of some titles and the endurance of others meant to American pop culture.
If you're a big fan of comic books, you'll no doubt get a little more entertainment value than the average reader, since there are names in here that will mean something to you. Most readers will find the Senate hearings interesting, and I found the story of the emergence of Mad Magazine quite interesting.
To sum up, The Ten Cent Plague isn't bad, but it certainly isn't everything it could have been. Other publishers than EC could have been discussed more, and the writing could have been tightened up considerably. Overall, the text felt lazy and poorly edited to me.
The Fall of Comics in America Have you ever wondered why the American comic book scene is dominated by costumed superheroes? There are other countries with well-developed comic book industries such as Japan, France, and Italy to give just a few examples. In these countries, comics are produced on a wide variety of topics and genres for every type of reader. Why is it that America does not have this type of mature comics industry?
The answer to that question lies in this book. There was a time in American history when American comics covered a wide variety of genres. In the 40's and 50's, American comics were at their peak in terms of creativity and variety. However, in this period of history, Americans became increasingly concerned about the growth of child crime in this age. Of course it would be difficult to link this growth in crime to real factors such as the violence of World War II or the Korean War, or the severe paranoia surrounding the Cold War, or the social disconnect caused by the growing trend of Americans moving to the suburbs, or the increase in the number of families in which both parents worked. These real factors would have been much too difficult to work with. Instead America found a scapegoat: comics.
By the 50's when the pressure really heated up in the war on comics, the trendiest genre was horror. In these horror comics, the theme was used to make criticism of the existing order in America where everything was painted as just cheery, but through these comics, children got an insight into what really lay beneath the surface of a perfect suburban America. In fact these comics were perhaps the only form of media in which children could get the message that it was OK to disagree with the status quo. This message was very comforting for millions of children. However, there were many people who were not comfortable with this, and the fact that this message was delivered through graphic depictions of murder, blood, and horror made it an easy target for a squeemish American public. The rest is history.
I really recommend this book. It will give you insight on how certain social issues can become scapegoats in difficult times. This could happen even in our time, so it is necessary to know how this can come about and how it can be prevented the next time it happens.
A Book That Needed to be Written This is a book on the part of the history of American Comics that needed to be written.
I got into comics in the early 1960's in teh second grade in 1964 when I was able to sufficiently read.
Actually, I was interested in comics even before than. It started with "The Adventures of Superman" TV show, "The Lone Ranger,," and Walt Disney's "Zorro."
In my young pre-hool years, I remember trying to scrounge comic books from older kids and relatives hoping that they would be finished with them and not want them anymore.
I used to get my mother on a rare occassion to buy me a comic book as she reluctantly gave in saying that I could ot read them. I had a younger brother who then came along and took sadistic pleasure in destroying them.
In 1962, I was then enrolled into a neighborhood Catholic school. Even in 1962, the fallout of the Great Coic Book Scare still prevailed. Back then if you read comic books you would be in danger of being stigmatized as a mentally deffective moral degenerate.
I grew up in a neighborhood in Queens, New York, that back then was predominantly a white, Italian-American, working class neigborhood. You had your share of kids who were to become juvenile delinuents and "Wannabes" with some ending up in prison and ding from drug overdoses and whatever.
Dr. Fredrick Wertham who wrote the book "Seduction of the Innocents" blamed comic books for juvenile delinquency and for kids growing up and turning to crime and getting involved in other deviant and anti-social behavior.
Well, I knew a number of these kids from school and from the neighborhood. I can tell you this. These kids did not read comic books. To them, only "babies" and "faggots" read comic books and someone who had to have something wrong with them upstairs. So there goes another great big hole blown into Dr. Fredrick Wertham's theory.
The nuns who though at the neighborhood Catholic school I attended in what Dr. Fredrick Wertham preached abou the evils oc comic books. Along with what Dr. Fredrick Wertham said, they also feared that we might one day tie a red cape or blanket around out neck and then try to take a test flight off the top of a roof.
Then after all that, they would tell you to take out your Religion books and open to a certain page and tell us that today, we are going to talk about Samson who used his super strength to signle-handedly slay an army of Philasteins. This would leave me scratching my head and wondering.
The Forgotten Story of a Witch-Hunt That Almost Killed Comics In this illuminating history of comic books, David Hajdu examines the cultural forces that led to a mid-century witch-hunt and the near death of an American art-form. Vilified as a source of juvenile delinquency by police and the press, burned in pyres by the church and youth groups, and attacked in congressional hearings and though state and local legislation, comic books and their creators finally fell victim to their publisher's own attempts to self-regulate content. Not until years later were comics to regain their former range of subject matter, stature, influence, and expression.
Though Hajdu stops short of judging the censors or drawing conclusions about societal effects of the comic-book scare, //The Ten-Cent Plague's// sympathetic treatment of comic book writers, artists, and editors places the issues of censorship and persecution squarely in the cultural milieu of the 1950s. Hajdu humanizes the faces behind the comics, bringing life to a nearly forgotten chapter of American history that might aptly be titled "Tales from the Crypt." In doing so, Hajdu allows readers to draw their own conclusions and leaves them hungry for more - and that's not a bad thing.
Reviewed by Jason Weeks
Disturbing Data Although at times weighed down by an overabundance of names, particularly artists, this is an excellent if disturbing picture of the rise and ultimate fall of the comic book industry in the mid 20th century. I know that artists are crucial in a story about artwork, but I got lost now and then trying to keep them all straight. Putting that aside, this chilling account shows the way the masses can be led to paranoid attacks on just about anything. After the second world war, people were running scared from many things (the threat of communism, fear of nuclear attack) and to find a scapegoat to blame as the root of juvenile delinquency was the fate of the free-wheeling, graphic, and often-violently free comic book industry at that time. The vicious and ill-founded attacks on comic books, in the late forties and then powerfully in the mid-fifties, is outlined extremely well by the author. For a sad glimpse of what "free America" can become under the correct warped leadership, this is a must to read. It is good to know that the comic book industry eventually revived after its ruin, but the tale of the squashing of creativity as happened in the fifties is a lesson to be learned by any age, as a warning to guard against similar spectres in the future.
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