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A review by lolaleviathan
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America by David Hajdu
4.0
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.
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.