Books : The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 741
EAN: 9780312428235
Format: Illustrated
ISBN: 0312428235
Label: Picador
Manufacturer: Picador
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: February 03, 2009
Publisher: Picador
Release Date: February 03, 2009
Sales Rank: 77828
Studio: Picador
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Product Description:
In the years between the end of World War II and the mid-1950s, the popular culture of today was invented in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. But no sooner had comics emerged than they were beaten down by mass bonfires, congressional hearings, and a McCarthyish panic over their unmonitored and uncensored content. Esteemed critic David Hajdu vividly evokes the rise, fall, and rise again of comics in this engrossing history.
Amazon.com Review:
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
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
The Ten-Cent Plague does an incredible job of framing the context of the early 1950s and helps us to understand how it was possible for comic books to be seen as a threat big enough to warrant book burnings and Congressional witch hunts. Well told story.
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The controversy over the damage that comic books can do to young impressionable minds in the 1950's is a very important historical counterpoint to know about. This is the age of McCarthy, schools teaching kids to drop and roll in the case of nuclear attack, Russia on the war path, Prague Spring, and a whole host of post world war two anxieties that gripped and held onto America throughout this decade. The attack on comics was no different, in the age of angst, comics started coming into their own and extending boundaries on what is and what is not acceptable. Society was bound to react in a draconian method which makes for fascinating reading 50 years later.
I found this book fascinating given the historical context of the time, from the end of world war two through the end of the 1950's with the adoption of the Comics Magazine Association of America is responsible for the death of the great American comic book. Bowing to social pressure, the comic book industry had to do something, and the end result was a gutting of the comic book industry. While no one at the time would see the eventual outcome of the CMAA, the influence has been felt by a generation of comic book readers and more. Even though the comic book industry has tried to work out of their slump, it has not gone as good has it could have been if the boundaries had continued to expand with comic books as much as they were expanding with society at the time.
While the comic book industry has ... Read More
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First, I have to admit that I am not a comic book expert or collector. I do have a modest collection of Black Hawk (Blackhawk) comics, but only because they were my favorites when I was a kid. I really did not read this work due to any overwhelming interest in comics. I did read them growing up and well remember the hysteria surrounding them in the 1950s. I will admit though that I did read quite a number of them during that time period. My parents liked peace and quiet and found that giving me a comic would shut my never ending talk up for a bit. I did read this book though because I do have a great interest in censorship in any form, and I am interested in the particular era covered by this work.
The author has certainly done some wonderful research with this offering. He gives us a very nice discussion of the history of the comic book in America, which I found quite interesting. I am sure that most comic enthusiasts will be aware of this information, but I was not, so I enjoyed it and learned. After his history he goes into the, as I said, "hysteria" which showed its ugly head every so often as to the effect this particular art form had upon the youth of our nation. Particular attention is made to the period of the late 1940s and the 1950s when the real trouble began.
Post war America was in many ways, a rather scary place. For those of you not there at the time, you need to remember stories of The Red Scare, The Bomb, Eugene McCarthy, women ... Read More
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The history of scapegoating in the 20th-century United States is a long one, with public fears about menaces real or imagined directed at alleged causes ranging from drugs to TV to rock and rap music, accompanied by reams of pontificating and propaganda that tend to seem pretty silly in hindsight (Reefer Madness, anyone?). In The Ten-Cent Plague, David Hajdu tells the story of one particularly dumbfounding example of mass hysteria that gripped the country in the late 1940's and early 1950's in the form of the campaign against comic books. Starting with the rise of the medium in the early 20th century as a mode of expression for minorities, tenement dwellers, and other outsiders, the book moves into an extensive retelling of the way the forces of reaction mobilized to turn comics into symbols of all that ailed society and their creators into pariahs. In a struggle about as even as a fight between Batman and a dimwitted petty thief, reason and moderation were swamped by a small army of their traditional enemies--conjecture, grandstanding, prejudice, moralism, and fearmongering. Supporting his claims with a wealth of direct quotations from those on all sides of the issue, from creators to consumers to persecutors, Hajdu details how occasionally legitimate concerns about excessively lurid comic-book content led to an all-out witch hunt and an example of the mob mentality at its most frightening.
Beginning with exaggerated accusations that comics were fueling a wave of ... Read More
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David Hajdu's "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America" begins with the sad story of Janice Valleau Winkleman, who retired to Florida after losing the comic-book-artist job she had begun at age 19 and worked for over a decade.
Winkleman was among hundreds of such artists -- mostly social misfits who found a common bond in a new art form, toiled for millions of enthralled readers, and then were hounded out of their jobs by high-minded hypocrites.
"The Ten-Cent Plague" tells how the full-color comic strips of early Sunday newspapers gave way to the more elaborate drawings of 1940's comic books. Among the early practitioners were Bill Gaines, who created MAD Magazine (which began as a satirical comic); and a gag writer named Bob Kahn, who became famous after he changed his name to Bob Kane and created Batman.
The book details how American kids delighted in the comics' anything-goes mission statement, only to be crushed by the adult sentiment of "Father knows best." Readers' parents, who merely sniffed at early comics as kiddie pablum, eventually felt threatened by their anti-authority attitude.
Chief among the book's villains is Frederic Wertham. He was a psychiatrist frequently called upon to testify -- with no documented evidence -- that all comic books led to juvenile delinquency and violent crimes.
Yet the book's most memorably violent imagery is that of American adults' public bonfires ... Read More
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