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

I found David Hajdu's book singularly diverting, entertaining, and informative. Most of all, and I can't quite define how or why, I found "The Ten-Cent Plague" to be downright cozy. Perhaps because I think of that era that way; nostalgia, I suppose.

I applaud Mr. Hajdu's unquestionable ability to vividly introduce the reader to (or remind him of; depending on one's age) an extraordinarily different era; a better time than this, in my humble opinion. He's a wonderful researcher and writer. But....

First, an intelligent and reasonable argument can be made that certain comic books were bizarre and lurid, and that their influence upon the young and impressionable wasn't exactly wholesome or salubrious. Mr. Hajdu's sneering dismissal of this viewpoint hardly indicates sophistication (as much as he may want to think that it does). Mind you, I'm not necessarily making this argument. I was an avid comic-book reader myself, and look how I turned out! My point is that such an argument isn't groundless, nor is it inherently evil. After all, contrary to what many people believe, there is nothing even remotely anti-American about a given community insisting on certain values and standards of conduct, and in employing censorship as a means. Until the egregious 1970s, the only form of censorship the courts would condemn and prohibit was government censorship; each community had the right and duty to establish and enforce its own standards.

Second, despite Mr, Hajdu's best efforts, he doesn't persuade (he certainly didn't persuade me) that the great comic-book scare was particularly scary. And this "scare" changed America? Oh, please.

Mr. Hajdu is more successful as an observer than as a commentator. And it is the hyperbole and silliness of some of his comments and historical claims that cost him a star. Still, four stars is nothing to sneeze at and I do indeed recommend this book.

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.

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.

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.

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.