Shocking True Suspense Tales of Weird Crime Horror Mystery

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	• The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America David Hajdu Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 25 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A decent book that should have been better

This book was recommended along with Amy Kiste Nyberg's "Seal of Approval". This one is more of a history and biography of the people, Nyberg's is more of an academic study. I'd 4-star this if it had presented itself as a history and a biography, but since it purports to be a review of the issues as well as the people I 3-star it - if you promise something you have to deliver it.

The book is about the people who worked in the comic book industry and the development of that industry up to the institution of the Comics Code, a self-regulatory system enacted to avoid government regulation of the comics industry. That's not actually what the book says it's about - it says it's about the industry as a whole and the impact of the Code - but I guess you can't judge a book by its cover.

I kill me...

Seriously, this is an interesting bit of history and stands on its own there. It recounts the business, and the political and cultural environment in the 1950s that all but killed the business. But it's those words "all but" that make the big difference between what this book purported to be and what it is. The fact is, comic books survived. They were published through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. They started coming back into their own in the 1980s, and by the 1990s the graphic novel craze had brought them right back. How did this happen? You won't find out in this book. Considering its subtitle is "The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America" I would have expected to see it deal with events both before and after. It doesn't.

Net-net: if you're looking for a historical document to describe a period of time and the people who were active in it, this book does that very well. The author is a journalist and uses those skills. Those aren't really the kinds of books I usually buy or read for pleasure, but your mileage may vary. I would have liked to have known the answers to questions like:

- Did companies that were subject to the Comics Code sell more issues than companies that weren't?
- Did parents actually consider whether a particular book was subject to the Comics Code when allowing their children to purchase?
- Did members of the Code try to push its limits or self-censor to make sure they stayed well inside its scope?

Without them, it was instructive for me and not a waste of time from a work perspective. With them, I would have made all my colleagues buy it. But this would have taken an author like Niall Ferguson, and this author isn't Niall Ferguson.

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The Censors Win One

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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Shocking True Suspense Tales of Weird Crime Horror Mystery

Comic books have gone through waves of popularity and condemnation, but the great scare of the early 1950s takes the cake. Here David Hajdu offers an enlightening cultural history of that bizarre witch hunt, which was not necessarily directed at the superhero stories that later dominated the medium, but the then-huge crazes of true crime and horror comics, the insanity and gruesomeness of which are still loved by nonconformists to this day. Hajdu starts with a selective history of comic books then proceeds to the cultural obsessions of the early 1950s, which created near-hysteria against anything that wasn't unabashedly conformist and squeaky clean. In a close parallel to the contemporaneous McCarthyism, critics and do-gooders were convinced that comic books created the menace of juvenile delinquency, with politicians and civic groups disregarding the lack of clear evidence in favor of holier-than-thou values and purity.

Hajdu does a great job deconstructing the great comic book scare into its component parts - a fear of nonconformity, cultural snobbery, political self-aggrandizement, shallow jingoism, and a refusal to accept the thinking power of kids. Knowledgeable observers will recognize that the rhetoric of the great comic book scare has repeated itself in subsequent cultural witch hunts like those against rock, rap, the Internet, and video games. Hajdu is an excellent cultural historian, and while he sometimes lapses into turgid professor-ese like "nor did they use Hooligan's clashes with the law for pedagogy," he really brings out the cultural and political causes and effects of a scare that was really about much more than comic books. Censorship Does Not Pay. [~doomsdayer520~]

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"We don't mean to censor" - uh huh!

This is a case study of how groupthink fueled by paranoia, political ambition, and lazy media outlets remiss in their responsibility to check the politicians can kill creativity.

The long list of comics industry folks who lost their jobs is appalling.

As a sometime writer of extreme horror fiction (DEADWEIGHT) and/or off-the-wall depictions of childhood icons (SANTA STEPS OUT), I can feel the chill even from 1954.

An eyeopener and a must-read!

reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5

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