Books : The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 302.232
EAN: 9780374187675
ISBN: 0374187673
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 448
Publication Date: March 18, 2008
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: March 18, 2008
Sales Rank: 3606
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Product Description:
In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created—in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress—only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine.
The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told—until The Ten-Cent Plague. David Hajdu’s remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority.
When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how—years before music—comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers.
The Ten-Cent Plague radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between “high” and “low” art. As he did with the lives of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington (in Lush Life) and Bob Dylan and his circle (in Positively 4th Street), Hajdu brings a place, a time, and a milieu unforgettably back to life.
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:  -
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
Rating: -
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
Rating: -
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
Rating:  -
When I saw the interview where the writer of this book said that he had never really read comics, He came across as just another mainstream person who writes aboutr a subject but has little or no education background on the subject itself. Yeah, real nice.
Rating:  -
What a wonderful book about a terrible waste and shameful time in American history. Hadju traces the rise of comics from the puckish newspaper funnies through the creation of the superhero pantheon, the diversity of comic book genres and the eventual painful demise under the censorship and revilement of the late 1950s society. I learned so many things from this book. What a tragedy that all those creative and talented writers and artists, most from minorities who were rejected from mainstream and "high" art were villified.
'Ten Cent Plague' shows an image of America at its best and worst; as a land that fostered the rise of an industry of great originality and intelligence and as a society of people so desperate for a scapegoat that adults and children both rounded up and burned thousands of comic books less than 10 years after the fall of the Nazis.
This was a fascinating, well-researched, immensley engrossing book and a vital reminder of the dangers of assigning blame to any one artist or medium.
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