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| The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America | 
 enlarge | Author: David Hajdu
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 7627
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 448
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.7
ISBN: 0374187673
Dewey Decimal Number: 302.232
EAN: 9780374187675
ASIN: 0374187673
Publication Date: March 18, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
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
Product Description
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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 18 more reviews...
 "I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry!" March 18, 2008
45 out of 48 found this review helpful
So thundered psychiatrist Frank Wertham in his 1954 Seduction of the Innocent, a book which accused comic books of breeding juvenile delinquincy (quoted on p. 6 of Hajdu's book). Today, Wertham's comparison between Hitler and comic books seems ludicrous. But at the time, millions of Americans took it seriously, and it brought down the comic book industry.
David Hajdu's wonderful The Ten-Cent Plague is a history of the culture war over comics that spanned the decade after the second world war. By the mid-40s, he claims, comic books were beyond doubt the leading form of popular entertainment, selling an astounding 80 to 100 million copies each week. Some 650 titles were released each month, and the industry employed around 1,000 writers, artists, and editors. The leading comic book publisher was EC, headed by the genius William Gaines.
The genre in those days, lead by EC, focused primarily on horror and crime, and some of the covers, interior artwork, and story lines could get gruesome: pools of blood, severed heads, stony-faced and scary killers. The artwork and storylines could get sexy too: heroines in filmy negligees, the occasional cleavage or bare foot showing. Middle class parents, egged on by a few religious leaders and political conservatives, began to express concerns, and those concerns grew into a national crusade against the "corrupting" influence of comic books. Editorials raged against them, politicians speechified against them, the Senate held hearings, and schools and churches sponsored comic book bonfires.
In an effort to salvage what it could, the comic book industry organized the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954, and promised to watchdog its product by promoting "wholesomeness and virtue" (p. 319). But the resulting CMAA Code, written to placate the blue-noses, destroyed the comic book. Cops and other authorities were never to be depicted with "disrespect." No comic book could use the words "horror" or "terror" in its title. All "lurid, unsavory, or gruesome illustrations" were forbidden. Ditto on the depiction of the "walking dead, vampires, ghouls, werewolfs, and cannibals." Ditto on "words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings" (pp. 291-292).
You get the drift. The enforcement of this Code transformed comic books into "funny books." Interesting art and storylines disappeared in the wake of the Code, to be replaced with comics about anthropomorphized animals. But the kids (and adults) who'd avidly read the old comic genre wanted little to do with its antiseptic replacement. By the mid-1950s, title release per month had dropped to one-third its mid-1940s level, and 8 out of 10 comic writers, artists, and editors were out of work. Most of the titles released by EC disappeared overnight.
William Gaines rebelled against the death of the comic by publishing MAD, which in a roundabout way (sketched by Hajdu in his final chapter) inspired the underground revival of the comic book in the late 1960s. But before that resurgence, one of the most brutal massacres of any culture war fought in America gutted an entire genre of popular art, and in the process intimidated and de facto blacklisted hundreds of talented artists.
Hajdu's book is a fascinating, frightening read. My guess is that few of us--even those of us who, like me, were kids during the comic book purging era--are familiar with the witch hunt that Hadju chronicles. It's well worth knowing about, particularly in an era when a new front of the current culture wars seems to open almost every week.
Censorship in four colors March 18, 2008
20 out of 25 found this review helpful
This book is an interesting overview of the "beginning of the end" of the great1950s' crime and monster comic craze that featured horrific comic book titles like Dick Briefer's The Monster of Frankenstein and The EC Archives: Crime Suspenstories Volume 1 (The Ec Archives), both of which quickly gets cancelled due to the creation of the self-imposed Comic Code Authority. The fuss starts when Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent (a scathing assault on the comic book industry due to its use of sex, violence and deviate behavior - all of which was aimed at children) is published and garnishes enough controversy to warrant a Senate committee hearing. The result: decades of censorship and wimpy white-bread superheroes cast as role models for the youth of America. THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE is a must read for any golden age comic fan.
Thoroughly Entertaining and Thought-Provoking! March 21, 2008
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
With THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE, David Hajdu does for comic books what his previous books did so brilliantly for music. Hajdu's research is exhaustive without being exhausting to read; THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE has the readability and vivid characters of a great novel as Hajdu tells his entertaining, thought-provoking account of the censorship debate over comic books in the 1950s, and how it trickled down into other aspects of pop culture and generation-gap clashes between youths and their parents. Instead of simply rehashing what comic fans already know, Hajdu digs deep into other areas, talking in-depth to the first-hand witnesses to these events, like the early comic creators who lost their jobs once people like Fredric Wertham and Estes Kefauver denounced comics as a corruptor of America's children -- you know, before heavy metal and video games and Fill In Your Favorite Bad Influence Here came along. :-) Hajdu brings the era and its struggles to life in a page-turner brimming with insight and affection. THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE is a must-read not only for fans of comics and pop culture, but for anyone intrigued with how censorship and power struggles shape society.
As We Finally Recover Our Sanity, and Our Love of Comics, Here's a Truly "Weird Tale" of How Bigotry Nearly Burned Out the Genre March 24, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
Here's something truly "Weird," "Scary" and "Amazing!" It's a history with a gripping-but-true story of American hysteria that most Americans probably have forgotten - or perhaps never knew -- until Columbia University journalism professor David Hajdu thoroughly researched America's crazy crusade against comics.
In the growing literature about Americans' love affair with comic books, Hajdu has staked a major cultural landmark with his new, "The 10-Cent Plague." As a journalist myself for more than 30 years, I've closely watched the ebb and flow of American comics and graphic novels. I can tell you this: Hajdu's cultural history is so fresh and so solid that, henceforth, anyone interested in understanding the strange twists and turns of our post-World War II culture will have to include his history of comic hysteria on any "must-read" list.
If you haven't heard Hajdu on NPR or read any of the growing number of magazine and newspaper articles about his book, the use of the term "hysteria" may sound - well, "Insane." But the tragic truth is that, starting in the late 1940s only three years after the defeat of the Nazis in Europe, Americans in towns across our nation felt it was their sacred duty to build comic book-burning bonfires, encouraging and sometimes compelling students to stand up for virtue at these conflagrations. Hajdu points out that this showed a terrifying blindness to world history - eerily reminiscent of the zealous book burnings in Germany in the 1930s.
A few wise American observers in that era recognized this historical irony - but, as shocking as this sounds, Hajdu documents that the mainstream of American media amounted to a frenzied mob in some Grade-B horror film. Almost no one was willing to defend comic books - and, as strange as this may seem, such current pillars of free speech as The New York Times, the New Yorker and the Hartford Courant actually poured fuel on the comic book pyres. If you doubt this, check out Hajdu's detailed reporting. He cites enough examples to make all of us in American media hang our heads these days to think of how wrong our venerable institutions could be.
This was, indeed, a very strange outbreak of paranoia and bigotry, which Hajdu deconstructs with fascinating anecdotes along the way. It was partly a flowering of fear about emerging youth culture that began as far back as the war years. It was partly a fear of the "sort of people" involved in producing comic books, who were considered socially unsavory - an ugly bias vaguely aimed at "lower-class" and immigrant Americans.
Along the way, much damage was done. New laws were passed to stamp out comics. Police action was taken against comic books and comic writers, artists, editors and publishers. Congressional hearings were held. Things got so ugly that Hajda devotes 14 pages in his appendix to listing the names of hundreds of men and women in comic book publishing houses "who never again worked in comics after the purge of the 1950s."
Why should we care? Well, first, this truly is a "good read." Hajdu obviously has been influenced by his love of comics and pulp fiction in general. He writes this history in a suspenseful narrative style that vividly paints key scenes for us, such as the first mass burning of comics in 1948.
Second, and more importantly, this is a cautionary tale against censorship, which cost the religious community far more than it gained by righteously crusading against pulp. During World War II, for example, Hajdu documents that Catholic leaders had discovered that comics served as important educational media for millions of young Catholics, especially those challenged by the English language. Thousands of parishes across the U.S. began using Bible-story comics for evangelism. Unfortunately, within a few years, a handful of overly zealous Catholic leaders jumped into the vanguard of a take-no-prisoners campaign to destroy comic producers.
It's only now - half a century after the purge - that comics are rebounding in a big way and, finally, there's growing interest in spiritual circles in drawing young readers into timeless truths with the powerful words and images of comic artistry.
The cover of Hajdu's book shows a teen-age boy sitting up late in bed, flipping the pages of a creepy comic book. It's a great cover design! I bet you'll find yourself sitting up late to finish "just one more chapter" of Hajdu's wild history of that explosive era.
The Censors Win One April 25, 2008
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
In hindsight, censorship so often seems ridiculous. It seems silly now that anyone was trying to keep readers from reading _Tom Jones_ a couple of centuries ago, or that seventy years ago, movies could not show married people sharing a double bed. A less familiar arena for censorship was comic books of sixty years ago, an effort that was not only silly but was successful. Before it, a kid could spend a dime to buy a horror or crime comic, which gives the title to _The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) by David Hajdu. The problem, according to the censors, is that kids were putting their dimes down for comics that were sexy and violent and which punctured the complacent conformity of the fifties. Hajdu, a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, has given a lively history of comic censorship (this is not an academic treatise) and the toll it took on liberty but also on the thousand-or-so artists, writers, letterers, and others who were putting out hundreds of comics a month. Hajdu says that with each comic traded and passed along, the comics reached more people than movies or television at the time, so when the censors succeeded, it was a real shift in culture, one worthy of documentation in this comprehensive and readable book.
Protests about comics started when they were first invented at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in the forties critics criticized the "mayhem, murder, torture, and abduction" handled by "superman heroics". This is one of the surprises in Hajdu's work: many of the censors were so eager to include all comics as insidious that they saw fault in the superheroes that we all know were fighting for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way." Psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham accused Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman of, respectively, fascism, homoeroticism, and sadomasochism. The main concern of Hajdu's book is the horror comics that had a brief lifespan, starting when Bill Gaines of EC Comics introduced them in 1950. The tales were not just bloody, they were weird, and were poorly understood by adults, who could only fathom that conventions were being challenged by the reading styles of youths who were at constant threat of becoming "juvenile delinquents" thereby. Dr Wertham, as an expert acknowledged by everyone who hated comics, was invited to testify before a 1954 Congressional hearing. Senator Estes Kefauver organized the hearing, as he had done for the more famous hearings on organized crime a couple of years before. A highlight of the book is Gaines's appearance before the committee. He was eager to testify, but was exhausted from a Dexedrine bender and did his cause little good. Kefauver faced him with the cover of a comic that showed a man gripping a blood-spattered ax in one hand and a severed head in the another, standing over the headless body of a woman. Gaines said he used his own good taste as a measure of what was permissible, and Kefauver fired up about the picture, demanding, "Do you think that is in good taste?" Gaines stammered, "Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic," and proceeded to explain that it would be bad taste if the man were shown lifting the head higher to show more gore. He essentially sealed the case against horror comics.
Hollywood had adopted a code that cleaned all the filth out of movies, and similarly the comics developed a code and a seal of approval. The code was one thing that killed the comics; the other was that Wertham and the Congressional hearing had made the occupation of working on comics unsavory in the eyes of the public. Artists who had taken pride in their work no longer liked admitting what they did. Like other publishers, Gaines capitulated, throwing hundreds of artists into other fields. They became postmen or security guards; one who went into advertising said he made a fine living, "But the work was work. It wasn't comics. You couldn't be as creative. It wasn't fun. You don't have the freedom... I missed comic books for the rest of my life." It isn't surprising that with the rebellion of the sixties that comics (or comix) were part of the trip. Gaines himself had a revenge of sorts. He took the satirical part of his comics and turned them into a magazine; if they were in a magazine, they didn't have to conform to any comics code. The magazine was _Mad_, and it was far more influential in making kids laugh and distrust authority than the horror comics had been in making them ax murderers. Nonetheless, the comics scare succeeded where the Commie scare had not; at the same time as the Congressional hearing on comics, Senator Joseph McCarthy was beginning his downfall. Hajdu's book is funny and revealing, and has excellent small biographies of the main players in the comics and anti-comics game. The anti-comics forces won this one for the censors, and put a temporary end to one particular branch of an art form that has come back in today's graphic novels. Those crying for censorship this time are having little effect.
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