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

Apr 12, 2011 Kemper rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, comics, non-fiction, history, time-mower-adventures

America 1954

“Howdy there stranger. I’m Chester.”

“Hey, Chester. I’m Kemper.”

“If you don’t mind me saying so, Kemper, your clothes look kind of odd.”

“Well, you’re certainly styling in your overalls. I’ll tell you a secret, Chester. I’m from the future. The year 2011.”

“Son, have you been drinking?”

“Well, yeah. But I’m not lying. I know it’s crazy, but I’ve got a time machine. A time mower, actually. It’s a long story. I haven’t used it lately after a bad experience running into some absolute morons ...more

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Jan 09, 2011 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: modern-culture-innit

Brothers and sisters, I take my text today from the gospel of Matthew, chapter 26, verse 41

Watch and pray, that ye enter not into TEMPTATION: the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.

That’s right, now I tell you some things you may not want to hear, you fall into temptation and you’re gonna go on the black diamond express train to hell, that’s right, yes you do. This train is known as the black diamond express train to hell. Sin is the engineer, pleasure is the headlight and the Devil...more

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Jun 26, 2008 Jason Pettus rated it 4 of 5 stars

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Fifty years after the fact, it seems that most of us have at least a general idea of the censorious, semi-fascist things that happened in this country during the 1950s, a time when the general populace became very interested in shrugging off the dark noir sweater of World War II and embracing the shin...more

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Mar 06, 2012 Mike (the Paladin) rated it 2 of 5 stars

This book gives most of the story of "the great comic book scare" but it does it from a somewhat slanted perspective. Oddly in part I agree with the aversion shown to the control freak reaction to comics. I lived through it and while there was a time when comics got hard to find they never vanished. They did end up having to toe a line...and in a way that's not good. (At heart I'm basically of a libertarian mind set).

While I sympathize with the book's point of view I don't agree with all that it...more This book gives most of the story of "the great comic book scare" but it does it from a somewhat slanted perspective. Oddly in part I agree with the aversion shown to the control freak reaction to comics. I lived through it and while there was a time when comics got hard to find they never vanished. They did end up having to toe a line...and in a way that's not good. (At heart I'm basically of a libertarian mind set).

While I sympathize with the book's point of view I don't agree with all that it puts forward. Comics under the "Comics Code" era were still good comics and there were some very well done ones. Yes it is a form of censorship, and that is frankly a bad thing. But it didn't destroy the books nor the industry. I was a collector. My collection dated from about 1964 on into the 1970s. Most of this is what is called "The Silver Age" of comics, and I wish I still had my collection.

Since the "free spirits" finally "broke free" from the chains of the Comics Code (and remember I was a collector and still going to comics shops up into the 80s and even the 90s to browse), the comics have become darker, more violent and more graphic in every way including the long sought after sexual freedom. And they did it almost in lock step. The comics industry is as bound today as it ever was, only from within...and it's dying.

No, The Comics Code no longer decided what young people could read but, thankfully, in most cases it seems parents have. I know that when my kids were of an age to buy comics, the age I bought them, I didn't feel safe allowing them to wander alone through a comics shop. Batman has "realized" his dark potential, Superman still holds on a bit, but they don't know what to do with him and in the last "movie" he was "written" to have produced a child out of wedlock. They don't really know what to do with Captain America, many of his fans still being (like me), conservative etc. so...they killed him. I understand he's coming back, but they still don't know what to do with the character. The Captain America comics made the news a while back when the Tea Party movement was clearly pictured as participating in a riotous demonstration with racial overtones (something that the actual Tea Party has never done anything close to). Marvel retracted (so to speak) the frames and apologized, but you see the problem. Comics are rife with dark themes and darker antiheroes... if they were truly free, wouldn't you think that there'd be a diversity (a favorite word these days) of characters and themes?

So, the book tells the story (or part of a story) of some comic history and early censorship attempts. I disapprove of censorship. Neither am I fond of the way comics have gone in the last 30 years. The publishers need to realize that Yes they're free to tell the stories they like, and that's good. Now if they wish to save the industry maybe they would want to consider printing what will actually sell?

UPDATE: Since I reviewed this the comic books' industry has come back (maybe not roaring back...but back) largely riding on the backs of some exceptional movies based on comic books. Bale's Batman was a better one and helped wipe out the memory of Batman and Robin (shiver). The Marvel Movies largely harkening back to the Silver Age have been as I said, exceptional. I was a fan of Captain America when young, he was my favorite comic book character (hero) and I was very..."concerned" about how he'd be portrayed in the movie. Happily it was done respectfully and very well....

There may still be hope for the industry. Everyone needs to remember that what we liked most about Stan Lee and Marvel was it's willingness to be different. (less)

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May 06, 2010 Jim rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, non-fiction

I heard David Hajdu in an NPR interview discussing this book, and it sounded pretty interesting. I looked forward to reading this, but it was a bit of a disappointment. The central focus of this book is the public uproar over comic books in the late 1940s and 1950s. Relative to the American cultural mainstream of the period, comics could be graphically violent and sexually suggestive. Many so-called experts claimed that they were a primary cause of what was seen as a wave of juvenile deliquency...more I heard David Hajdu in an NPR interview discussing this book, and it sounded pretty interesting. I looked forward to reading this, but it was a bit of a disappointment. The central focus of this book is the public uproar over comic books in the late 1940s and 1950s. Relative to the American cultural mainstream of the period, comics could be graphically violent and sexually suggestive. Many so-called experts claimed that they were a primary cause of what was seen as a wave of juvenile deliquency and decadence, much as people today blame video games for youth violence.

Estes Kefauver, the crusading Senator (some would say grandstander) with presidential ambitions, held hearings on the issue. Comic book artists and publishers were called to testify and were browbeaten. (Anyone who has watched any C-SPAN will know that, in legislative hearings, congressmen and senators love to hear themselves talk.) Comic books were accused of being socially subversive and a danger to America's youth.

As a result, many comic publishers went out of business. MAD, which had been published in a comic book format, switched over to being a tamer magazine. Comics were subjected to censorship and bowdlerized as a result.

I found the subject matter quite interesting, and I'm sure that hardcore comic book geeks would like this a lot. My disappointment stems from the relative lack of a broader cultural-historical context. There's a lot of potential material here: comics as a cultural medium of immigrants, the working classes, and the young. Many of the comics artists of the 1940s in New York were Jewish or Japanese-Americans, a remarkable fact given contemporary events. Hajdu doesn't do much with this information, except briefly mention it.

Hajdu does fill a lot of space with quote after quote from the artists, writers and publishers he interviewed. A lot of this gets numbing after a while. Also, for a book about comics, there are precious few pictures in here, and all are in black and white.

Hajdu paints a bleak picture of censorship, suppression and cynical misuse of government power. Yet, comics rebounded as a cultural form. If anything, the satirical bite of comics in the 1960s was more effective than most of the comics of the preceding decade. The storytelling of today's comics is superior to most of what came before. MAD magazine, to my mind, entered its glory years in the late 60s and 70s. All of this doesn't even take into account the variety of comic books today in which the artwork is tremendous and that have complex, deeply psychological storylines. I think Hajdu's account would have been better rounded had he taken account of this revitalization. (less)

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Apr 03, 2008 Dan rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: all comic fans, anyone opposed to censorship

Shelves: 2008

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 (and thankfully there's only one) 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 a nut, but he never for one day held as much sway over parents and lawmakers as Fredric Wertham and Estes Kefauver held over America in 1...more 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 (and thankfully there's only one) 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 a nut, 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 (witch)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.(less)

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Feb 26, 2009 Jim Marshall rated it 4 of 5 stars

For the last two years, I've been reading graphic narratives with a small group of doctoral students, and I came to this book because of my conversations with them. We've been concentrating on 'serious' graphic narratives (Speigelman's Maus, Satrapi's Persepolis, Sacco's Palestine, Thompson's Blankets, etc.) as opposed to the 'classic' authors (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner) because we were finding that graphic narratives, though immensely rich and often deserving of the closest of readin...more For the last two years, I've been reading graphic narratives with a small group of doctoral students, and I came to this book because of my conversations with them. We've been concentrating on 'serious' graphic narratives (Speigelman's Maus, Satrapi's Persepolis, Sacco's Palestine, Thompson's Blankets, etc.) as opposed to the 'classic' authors (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Will Eisner) because we were finding that graphic narratives, though immensely rich and often deserving of the closest of readings, were not getting a whole lot of respect in scholarship or in classrooms. Too often they were represented as a bridge for 'struggling' readers or as an entertaining break from canonical literature for more successful readers. But in our discussions we found that these narratives, far from being naive or simplistic, actually raised a lot of important questions about how graphic images convey meaning and how verbal and graphic messages can both complement and complicate each other.

The reading project made me want to look back to the origins of graphic texts, and this book is a first rate popular history of a particular period in their development. From the mid-1930's through the 1950's, comic books were growing in sophistication, in popularity, and in the range of genres, characters, and topics they introduced--crime, horror, romance, and the supernatural among them. In the late 40's and early 50's however, an enormously powerful political/moral backlash against comic books swept the country, with televised congressional hearings, apoplectic newspaper editorials, wide-spread censorship, and, worst of all, publicly supported book burnings in which students were offered rewards for trading in comic books, which were destined for the fire, for "good" literature which would make them all more wholesome. In one community, kids who participated in the book burning were given a letter that said in part, "Dear Young Reader. You have performed a great service to your country today, by getting rid of those crime and horror books. Those books were like enemies who were trying to destroy good American boys and girls....America is not a land of crime, horror, murder, hatred, and bloodshed. America is a land of good, strong, law-abiding people who read good books, think good thoughts, do great work, love God and their neighbor. That's America."

You get the picture. The book is a reminder of how often the books kids enjoy are used against them and how easily we assume that reading about scary, bad stuff will make kids do scary, bad stuff. (less)

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Oct 10, 2012 Richard rated it 4 of 5 stars

Rating: 4* of five

Just read it. It's sixteen kinds of fascinating and a few more kinds of awesome.

Seriously. Just go get one and read it! Quit looking at reviews! Too much good stuff in here that anyone alive in this horrifying over-religioned right wing fucking nightmare country we've allowed to develop in our beloved USA should know about! Censorship and fear-mongering and lying sack-of-shit conservatives are not new developments...just more common than ever.

ETA This encouragement brought to y...more

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Aug 26, 2008 le-trombone rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction-history

A better title for this book might have been "The Circumstances That Caused Bill Gaines To Create Mad Magazine"

It's not unusual to focus on a small group to make a larger historical point, but the details of the anti-comic book hysteria (and it did reach the point of mob panic) could have been covered in greater detail. As it is, the details that we do get, from a senator with presidential ambitions to the "doctors" who would use psychobabble to find the inherent dangers of this still new art fo...more

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May 30, 2008 Lola Wallace rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: people interested in the issue of censorship; comix nerds

Shelves: history, americana

In Positively 4th Street, David Hajdu examined how four individuals (Bob Dylan, Richard Farina and Joan and Mimi Baez), or at least their images, embodied the contradictions of 1960s America. The Ten-Cent Plague focuses on an earlier, more forgotten battle in twentieth-century American culture wars: the mass hysteria over and subsequent banning of comics. He traces comics from their inception in the Sunday funnies to the explosion of crime, horror and romance comics in the early '50s.

Hajdu is n...more In Positively 4th Street, David Hajdu examined how four individuals (Bob Dylan, Richard Farina and Joan and Mimi Baez), or at least their images, embodied the contradictions of 1960s America. The Ten-Cent Plague focuses on an earlier, more forgotten battle in twentieth-century American culture wars: the mass hysteria over and subsequent banning of comics. He traces comics from their inception in the Sunday funnies to the explosion of crime, horror and romance comics in the early '50s.

Hajdu is not the liveliest prose stylist, but the story itself is as engaging as a pre-Code comic book, full of twists and turns, highs and lows. Hajdu is at his best when he describes the individual personalities at play, fascinating characters like Estes Kefauver, Fredric Wertham and Bill Gaines. I found myself near tears when EC head and Mad publisher Gaines tore up his own horror comics on national television. Without too much editorializing, Hajdu shows the creative, anarchic atmosphere of early comics, a haven for artists and readers marginalized by mainstream media (for writers, often because of color, gender or ethnicity; for readers, age) and subsequently how tragic the eventual adoption of the Comics Code was for these individuals as well as the country at large.

He briefly examines the fascinating contrast between Kefauver and Hendrickson's juvenile delinquency hearings with those of the contemporary, Joseph McCarthy, on the subject of Communism. Hajdu's analysis is so clear and insightful that I wish he did more of it: McCarthyism was fundamentally anti-elitism, while the anti-comics movement vilified the vernacular and common in favor of "High" Culture. What a fascinating encapsulation of the warring drives present everywhere in American culture: I need only point to the past several presidential elections... and the ones before those... Another reviewer complained that a discussion of the comics scare should include some comparison to current debates about video games or music, but this isn't really Hajdu's style, and I think most readers can make these connections on their own. (less)

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May 18, 2008 Bill rated it 4 of 5 stars

So here's the thing about this book.

I enjoyed it. It was an excellent account of the conflict with comic books between about 1935 and 1952.

The author, David Hajdu, did a good job talking about the contexts and subtexts; he traced the line of important events well. He assigned Fredric Wertham the role of villain, dissecting his arguments to ban comic books. He made people like Eisner, Duker and Elder heros - it was almost to black and white for me. For example, he talked about the fallacy of Wert...more

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May 03, 2008 danny rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, sociological

Overall, I enjoyed this book, but because of the writing style, it didn't blow me out of the water...

The narrative takes place primarily in post WWII America. The political and social landscape is greatly influenced and shaped by America's emergence as a military and political world power as well as the "hive mentality" communist/Soviet paranoia (which later morphed into the McCarthy-dominated House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings (HCUA)). That social environment bred a climate that...more

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Apr 12, 2008 Lisa rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2008-reading-list, nonfiction

Lots of research went into this book. It's filled with quotations and excerpts from numerous sources from the comic world both modern and historical. If you're interested in comics, then you'll probably really enjoy this book, because, after all, there really isn't enough written about comics--despite their popularity and artistic merits.

However, if you're more of a lay person, you may have some trouble. This caution would also apply if you're reading more for what happened after the governmenta...more Lots of research went into this book. It's filled with quotations and excerpts from numerous sources from the comic world both modern and historical. If you're interested in comics, then you'll probably really enjoy this book, because, after all, there really isn't enough written about comics--despite their popularity and artistic merits.

However, if you're more of a lay person, you may have some trouble. This caution would also apply if you're reading more for what happened after the governmental hearings on comic books and juvenile delinquents.

I picked Ten Cent Plague up because it was receiving some really positive reviews and sounded like a very interesting investigation of comics from a society stand point.

It's obvious that the author is a great fan of the comics genre, so obvious in fact, because he could not resist page after page of name dropping. Avid comic readers will probably recognize many of the names, but they're used more as page filler, often mentioned once without the text ever coming back to them.

I don't think this book is complete enough to be considered a thorough history of comics (the period investigated was highly researched, but again, that listing strategy of including everyone once without any explanation was a detriment), but is also lacking an 'effect' follow up to make it a social commentary. The book follows by and large a chronological move through the comics industry with countless split trails into stories or factoids. There is no explanation of how the events related ultimately changed the country as a whole.

As this was the part of the book I was most interested in, I was very disappointed.

Another draw back is the lack of pictures. There is a brief insert in the middle of the book with a few black and white photographs and that's it. The majority of the book relies on text descriptions by the author. Since the real conflict was about these very images, I felt that it left something lacking in the book not to arrange for reprints to be included.

If you're looking for a summary of what happened during the hearings about comics and juvenile delinquents, as well as what led up to them, then this book is probably a good fit for you. This is an area of history that has been by and large ignored and The Ten Cent Plague offers a thorough and explanatory approach. If you're more interested in what effects these hearings had on America (and not limited to a brief chapter explaining how just the comics industry changed) then you might want to just borrow this title.

But you should still read it.(less)

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Apr 03, 2008 Gregory rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Ten Cent Plague recalls a time in American history when juvenile delinquency was on the rise and top of mind. So the cause had to be found and rooted out. What was it? Comic books. Just years after images of nazi's burning books reached America, we rolled up our sleeves and had some bonfires ourselves. In all seriousness, the crackdown on comics in the 1950s resulted in hundreds of people losing their jobs. This time also saw a rise in some of the great serious comic artist/writers of the 20...more

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Nov 26, 2008 Thomas added it · review of another edition

Shelves: could-not-finish, history

This just didn't interest me. The narration was a little dull. I'm not a big fan of comic books, so maybe it's not a surprise that I didn't finish this book.

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Sep 10, 2008 Qiana rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: comics, nonfiction, books-i-teach

Excellent for understanding the pivotal years surrounding the early debates over censorship in the comic book industry. It's easy to forget just how influential the medium was when nearly 90% of boy and girls under 18 were reading comics! Hajdu spends quite a bit of time on the rise and fall of EC Comics, which I really enjoyed. A nice complement to Wright's Comic Book Nation and full of hilarious quotes like this one from a 1947 article in The New Republic: "Every hour spent in reading comics i...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Sarah rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: comic-book, graphic-novels, historical, nonfiction

This is a wonderful social history book. For people who like straight-up history, you have art, literature, controversy, and politics. For people who love comic books, this book is bursting with the early lives of some of the greats (Will Eisner, Stan Lee). For people who don't usually go for history but enjoy memoir, there are enough amusing anecdotes from a wide variety of people to keep you turning the pages to see how the persecution of comics affected every day folks.

As a history major, I...more

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May 05, 2011 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

When I was in the third grade (1976 or so), I had the somewhat traumatic experience of seeing a prized issue of Green Lantern torn to shreds by my elderly reading teacher, who was trembling with disgust and anger as she ripped it into progressively smaller pieces. Honestly, until I read this book, I was never able to understand how anyone could be so filled with rage at the sight of a simple comic book, and so intent on destroying it.

I always thought that the popular marketing of teenage rebelli...more

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Feb 01, 2011 Beronica rated it 3 of 5 stars

This was a 10 CD audio book from the library that I vaguely had some knowledge from my youth reading a few comic books but mostly from watching numerous comic book based cartoons, attending several ComiCon Conventions and hearing comics fanatics banter about their favorite publishers. To tell you straight off, I couldn't read the book and would not wish the pain on anyone. However, no matter how dull, dark or excruciatingly detailed it was at times, I think it gave a good account of the history,...more

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May 05, 2009 Damian rated it 5 of 5 stars

The 50s saw two waves of hysteria sweep the United States -- one, over the supposed infiltration of the US government by communist spies, and the second, over comic books. At the height of this national panic, comic books were burned in great bonfires reminiscent of the Nazis and repressive legislation all but destroyed the comic book industry.

Up to this point comics had been the creative Wild West -- flamboyant, irreverent and incognizant of any boundaries of taste, it's little wonder that the...more

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Apr 05, 2009 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars

Hajdu retells one of the most often told stories in comics culture, that of Fredrick Wertham's _Seduction of the Innocent_ study linking delinquency and the comics, and the subsequent drive to ban comics that ended the era of EC and ushered in what someone, maybe Doug Wolk, called a wave of enforced blandness.

Hajdu does a really good job with the material, showing that the process that led to the outrage in the fifties was the result of at least a decades worth of serious and sustained agitation...more Hajdu retells one of the most often told stories in comics culture, that of Fredrick Wertham's _Seduction of the Innocent_ study linking delinquency and the comics, and the subsequent drive to ban comics that ended the era of EC and ushered in what someone, maybe Doug Wolk, called a wave of enforced blandness.

Hajdu does a really good job with the material, showing that the process that led to the outrage in the fifties was the result of at least a decades worth of serious and sustained agitation, and was not the result of a couple actions or spontaneous, as it is sometimes portrayed-- instead, it's a pretty complex story with lots of players and lots of crucial moments along the way.

Hajdu's book has a sort of controversial thesis, which was aired out a lot when this book was first reviewed, that the backlash against comics was primarily generational, and was the first wave of attack against the counter-culture that would soon advance via rock and roll and beat poetry. I like this idea, and I think there's some merit to it on its face, but I'm not sure I think Hajdu convinces me that his argument is the right one, at least not as convincingly as he makes the case that a lot of the anxiety over the comics, for example, is a hold-over from concerns about class. I agree these are related topics in some ways, but not the same, and Hajdu doesn't completely convince me, though it's an interesting enough approach that I at least like to toy with the idea.

In the same vein, Hajdu's history of EC differs from the accounts with which I'm most familiar, in one crucial dimension-- Hajdu gives a lot more creative credit to Al Feldstein, and Bill Gaines especially, than I think I've seen in previous stories of EC. I think Hajdu might be onto something about their impulses and the way they are played out in the marketplace, chasing horror especially. But I sort of struggle with what I've heard elsewhere to attribute so much of the creative success of the line to the work of these two, a point Hajdu seems to grudgingly admit when, for example, he talks about Feldstein's humor comic _Panic_. It had long been my understanding that most of the creative success, on the writing side at least, of EC was based on Harvey Kurtzman's work. (On the artistic side, the credit is more shared and spread around). But it's possible I'm just wrong about that. I mention it here because as far as a correction of the historical record, I wonder about it a little more than in some of the other areas of Hajdu's book, areas where he's the first I've seen to cover some of this ground so I'm less inclined to disagree.

These concerns aside, Hajdu's book is pretty amazing-- the writing, while never showy, is crisp and intelligent, his selection process of his material shows great discretion, and it's a consistently interesting book. A really nice piece of work that's also a solid history that doesn't skimp on the facts that will make it an incredible resource.

Matt(less)

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Jul 14, 2012 Alex Nagler rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: not-exactly-comics, history

This book serves two important purposes:

1) It is a worthy history of comic books from their inception to the mid 1950s, where it looks like the medium may have very well ceased after being legislated (both internally and externally) to near death. It also doesn't focus on eternally holy troika of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman with what was then EC, which is refreshing as nearly all comic book history I have read, both in terms of real articles and fictional accounts like the always fantasti...more This book serves two important purposes:

1) It is a worthy history of comic books from their inception to the mid 1950s, where it looks like the medium may have very well ceased after being legislated (both internally and externally) to near death. It also doesn't focus on eternally holy troika of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman with what was then EC, which is refreshing as nearly all comic book history I have read, both in terms of real articles and fictional accounts like the always fantastic "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay", tend to hone in on the development of everyones favorite tights wearers. Instead, this focused on the crime, horror, and romance genres, as well as the road that lead to the birth of Mad Magazine.

Hajdu dedicates the book to three specific individuals, but spends 13 pages listing the names of writers, illustrators, and producers who would never again work in comics after the Congressional hearings that nearly killed the entire industry. One of the last images of the book is Stan Lee being forced to fire his entire company, a good decade prior to creating much beloved (and as of late, financial powerhouses) characters like Captain America, Thor, The Fantastic Four, and my personal favorite Marvel supe, Spider-Man.

All of these characters were, of course, code compliant. Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson suddenly dealt with Kathy Kane (One wonders what good ol' Dr. Wertham would say to the woman brought in to counter his criticism of anything improper going on in Wayne Manor becoming the DCU's highest ranking lesbian, Superman and Lois Lane never did anything improper, Wonder Woman just became boring, and Spidey's senses never tingled in ways you'd expect out of a high school student. As we know from the benefit of being able to look backwards, eventually people's wards became junkies, demons were unleashed from bottles, folks with green rings helped every color of person, and thank the publishing gods almighty, imprints like Vertigo were created to do whatever the hell they wanted.

We now live instead in a world where the IP of the Comic Code is owned by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, an organization I'm proud to donate money to every year at NYCC (just bought my three day badge). Instead of censoring comics for indecency, we've moved onto a climate where we fight for the ability of authors and artists to do as they please. For every tale of the good and proper in the world of Supes, Bats, and Spidey, The Boys will blow the bloody doors off, Hit Girl is here to kick your ass, and Robert Oppenheimer's evil twin brother will eat him to acquire his knowledge (if you're not reading the Manhattan Projects, what is wrong with you?).

But it's not just delicious ultraviolence that the death of the code has brought about. We're also free to imagine what the world would be like without men, how a human would react to gaining the voice of God, vivaciously visage visions of virtue and violence, mess with perspectives of temporal flow to make for excellent story telling, and most importantly, to Dream (and Destiny and Death and Destruction and Desire and Despair and Delirium).

I have in this Goodreads library a tag that I recently added called "Not-Exactly-Comics," on which I've categorized things like Feynman, Logicomix, Asterios Polyp, and Zahra's Paradise. I read the likes of Preacher, Sandman, Y, and others before I started heavily using Goodreads, but if I had while I was reading them, they'd be here too. I do not, however, include every single issue I pull weekly. That would add an additional eight to ten books a week for me. As someone who takes part in the yearly chalenges, this would falsely inflate my score. I am not, however, saying that comic books are not tantamount to good literature. A well penned Grant Morrison Batman arc is sometimes all I need for a good time. And Checkov's gun works great in banana peel format.

In short, comic books are fun. Some of them are amazing means of escapism, some of them are great literature, and sometimes, you just like to see a guy in tights run around and fight baddies. They're not about to go and have kids beat people up.

Now video games, on the other hand. Why just yesterday, I nearly killed someone by replacing their heart with a mechanized baboon heart so I could try to overheal them...(less)

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Nov 09, 2011 Andrea Blythe rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction

This book covers the history, development, and controversies that surrounded the comic book industry from its inception in Sunday newspapers at the beginning of the century to its "golden age" in the late forties/early fifties through to it's near collapse at the end of the fifties.

This was a fascinating book, one that I thought did a fabulous job of capturing the rapture of the artists, writers, and publishers and contrasting that with the fervor of those wishing to put at end to the threat of...more

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Apr 01, 2009 Jason rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

OK time for the latest entry in my ongoing effort to understand the forces that shaped my youth. I was born in 1970, and was in to comic books before I could read. Throughout my childhood, every comic book cover I could remember was marred by a little symbol with a 50's sort of aesthetic for the "comics code authority." When I bothered to contemplate it -- which was not often -- it had the ring of governmental respectability, which was precisely the point.

David Hadju sets out to tell the story...more OK time for the latest entry in my ongoing effort to understand the forces that shaped my youth. I was born in 1970, and was in to comic books before I could read. Throughout my childhood, every comic book cover I could remember was marred by a little symbol with a 50's sort of aesthetic for the "comics code authority." When I bothered to contemplate it -- which was not often -- it had the ring of governmental respectability, which was precisely the point.

David Hadju sets out to tell the story of how that little symbol came to be. In doing so, he filled in a gap in my knowledge of the history of comics. Oh, I knew the big picture. There were horror comics, some pseudo-psychology in the form of a book called "Seduction of the Innocent" and allusions that Batman and Robin were a little more than "ward and benefactor." But that was about it. This book also explained another hazy impression from my youth -- my grandparents' attitude towards comic books. My mom and dad always seemed happy that I was reading. My grandparents really seemed to think that comic books were somehow rotting my brain. They accepted that I was going to keep reading them; but it came with the same forbearance that contemporary grandparents might extend to tongue piercing.

All that is in this book. Hadju really explores a theme that has risen to the surface about the early days of comic books. Namely, that it was the subculture of American immigrants and the dispossessed. Jewish artists and writers, thanks to Michael Chambon, are understood to be a part of this subculture. But, there are other elements: women, Asians, African Americans -- people who would never be accepted on Wall Street -- could find a career in comic books.

Circulation soared. The industry was selling 2 million copies a month -- and all those copies were being shared and traded. While all of my life, comic books were dominated by the Superhero genre -- which was always fine by me -- previously, comic books were subject to the same sort of trends that you find in other popular media. Like television later, comics would hop from comedy to superheroes to westerns to war stories to sci fi to horror and then romance. Publishers were notorious for jumping on the latest thing.

But then, it all started getting out of hand. Exhibit A was EC comics. Crime comics and their somewhat sympathetic depiction of criminals had started the public concern. But the interruption of the war -- and the affiliation of comic superheroes with the patriotic war effort -- deadened this initial flurry of outrage. Yet, you can see as the red scare creeps up, and "juvenile delinquency" enters the popular lexicon, comics are going to be in trouble.

As someone who lived through the Congressional circus on Rap Music and Video games, the mania described by the Ten Cent Plague seems all too familiar. Boycotts, civic groups, media outrage culminating in Congressional hearings. But this was the first time the public had gone through this cycle. So, with comic books you could add book burning and black listing before the inevitable attempt at self-regulation.

The book focuses on Bill Gaines, publisher of EC comics and poster child for the excesses of the industry, and his war with Frederick Wertham, psychiatrist and author of Seduction of the Innocent. But in the process, we also uncover the paths of a lot of legendary names in comics -- Eisner, Wally Wood, Stan Lee. Many of them would kind of wander half-dead in the industry during my youth. Bill Gaines and Stan Lee would take opposite tacks. Gaines held on to Mad "comics" by converting it to Mad Magazine. It would be a staple of my youth for anti-authority humor. Stan Lee decided he knew how to deliver comics under the new rules, and could work within the CCA. He would eventually break the mold of two dimensional superheroes by treating them as people, with personal problems.

Compellingly, the book ends with a short epilogue in the small village in France where Robert Crumb lives. He gives a little testimonial about what it was like to be a fan of the early comics and then have them abruptly censored out of existence. In short, it inspired the creation of the underground comics movement. Something that never captured my own interest, but which I would find in the seedy little comic stores of my youth.

I did not appreciate it then, but do know. This movement kept the flame of spirit of the early comics. It maintained the lifeline for a more sophisticated readership -- a lifeline that would culminate in the modern era of "graphic novels." An era where comics have attained the status of works of art and literature -- not something to be casually discarded.

As I contemplate the motion picture release of the Watchmen, you can only gasp at the bizzare turn of societal events around this little slice of counter-culture. Hadju has a compelling narrative style that pushes the story along, but allows for the little human details that make the story worth knowing. Its a breazy read and anyone interested in censorship, comics or the 50s is bound to enjoy it.
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Feb 07, 2009 Dan rated it 2 of 5 stars

Some of my favorite comic books are the horror anthology comics published by EC Comics in the 1950's. This book focuses on that era of comics and specifically on how a wave of hysteria built up to the point that government forces pushed many of the publishers, writers out of the business for good.

Although the two are probably inextricable, I was more interested in the history of the comics from that era than I was in the story of their downfall. David Hajdu, in a writing style that can best be d...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Rahadyan marked it as to-read

I've been a comic book reader for 41 years and arguably a fan of the genre since writing a letter to the editor of Justice League of America in 1972 and reading about the history of the medium in Steranko's two-volume History of the Comics. So I've known about Dr. Fredric Wertham's polemic Seduction of the Innocent and some of the public backlash against comic books in the 1940's and 50's. However, David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague recounts details of how that backlash affected not just the read...more

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Feb 16, 2009 Ethan rated it 4 of 5 stars

I was worried when I first started this book that there would be a lot of overlap with another comics history I read, Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones. Yet they were two very different approaches to the same topic. This book very much focussed on the public furor over comic books in the 1950s and what led up to it, and the author has an interesting argument that comics were a precursor to the rise of other youth culture movements, the 1960s, rock n roll, etc.

The one complaint I have is that I wis...more

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Jan 12, 2009 Trin rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, american-lit

A workmanlike account of the rise and fall of comic books, from their creation in the early part of the 20th century to their near-destruction at its midpoint. Hajdu provides ample quotage both from interviews with comic book creators and from the various writings of comic book detractors. Basically the two arguments can be summed up thusly:

Pro-comics: FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION! Also, sex and violence really sell!
Anti-comics: THINK OF THE CHILDREN! Also, my anti-comics screeds really sell!

Hajdu (and...more

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Jul 12, 2011 Spiros rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: civil-libertarians, and librarians

Shelves: remainders

Americans seem to have an unlimited capacity for fear; fear of Catholics, fear of Blacks, fear of Homosexuals, and fear of their own progeny. The rise of juvenile delinquency, brought about by the social upheavals congruent with the Second World War, led to the scapegoating of the comics, which were largely created by misfits who were mostly Jewish, another ethnicity Americans have shown a great deal of trepidation about. This book makes a good companion piece to Men Of Tomorrow, although it is...more

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Feb 26, 2009 Dale rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: comic-book-related, history

I've read several books about the history of American comic books, some published by the large publishing houses who survive today (DC and Marvel) and others in a more independent vein, but they all tend to follow the same arc. They touch on the invention of the comic strip, its repackaging as a comic book, the ascent of the superhero and the proliferation of genres from romance to Western to horror. Then there's a breif mention about the comic books decline and near-demise in the fifties. Somet...more

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Review - Golden Casino	1	12	Jul 28, 2009 07:29pm
Bookstore Event in NYC on April 10th	1	13	Apr 04, 2008 09:45am

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

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