Copyright 2008 Ben S. Pollock
Book report: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu
When I saw this title online I had a flashback. In an early primary school year (the early 1960s) Mrs. Friedman gave me for my birthday a subscription to a Disney comic book. Mom was aghast as I was forbidden all comic books and Mad Magazine, but Miss Elizabeth was a dear family friend whom Mom would not hurt for the world. So every few weeks this Goofy periodical came in the mail. I was unhappy, too. I was a Sendak/Where the Wild Things Are little boy, no way a Mickey and Donald sissy.
In recent years I asked Mom, and she too remembered this well. Her reasoning was that she had read psychological proof that comic books stunted intellectual development. Newspaper strips and editorial panels were not only allowed but encouraged, as well as New Yorker cartoons. In the hours wasted on comic books I could be reading real books, and that was what I was to do.
What Mom was raising me on, besides Dr. Spock, likely was the “research” explored in David Hajdu’s latest popular history. Comics, cartoons and illustrations in some form have been in newspapers since the 1700s, and the author notes that before the Great Depression some of them were bound into collections in pamphlet, magazine or book form. What came to be called comic books began in the 1930s — Superman was debuted in 1938 — and picked up speed after World War II. Not only was the momentum a publishing phenomenon, but with it the medium’s eccentric publishers, artists and writers diversified. The demand moved the firms to become factory-like with the drawing board and typewriter equivalent of assembly lines. Publishers were happy to hire or commission women (including novelist Patricia Highsmith) and minorities; they were blind to all but talent and output.
They knew the buyers only roughly: teens — not only boys — and young adults. By being scarcely older themselves, they created what they wanted with no self-censorship (until the end), knowing people like themselves wanted entertainment, escape and adolescent rebellion. Without market research, they increased the variety of books and stories and counting the number sold or returned. Horror, science fiction, high-school life (Archie) and romance were added. Mad debuted in 1952. Besides in genres the competing publishers imitated one another without shame. Key to this history, though, is that horror comics showed every bloody detail and detailed criminal acts including prostitution, though tamely by today’s standards. Sex was off-stage, and nudity was hidden under tight clothing or outside the skimpy outfits of “jungle girls.”
In less than five years, politicians, self-appointed experts and other do-gooders began to find in comics a common enemy. These comprise Hajdu’s villain, and by 1955 the bad guys win. They argued that this sort of publication led to delinquency among bad kids and jaded the good teens. This led to book burnings and legislated bans, less than a decade from Nazism and Fascism by people worried about Communism and its suppression of rights. The author makes this irony clear every time it comes up.
Hajdu mentions everyone, it seems. But he gives scant attention to those who produced Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman etc., perhaps because they’ve already been well-explored. He focuses on one shop: EC, Educational Comics of M.C. “Charlie” Gaines then brought to infamy by his son and our book’s hero Bill Gaines. EC Comics had colorful characters, many of whom were alive to give Hajdu interviews, but it also had the bloodiest and sexiest — for the 1950s — volumes, and not least: created Mad, essentially its only surviving title.
As a child at the grocery with Mom I would be allowed to hang out at the magazine racks where I went through Mad, though could not take it home. While in later years I would be a fan of Laugh-In and Saturday Night Live, whose creators must claim Mad as a direct ancestor, I never quite loved the parody-satire magazine. I got a kick out of some stories and jokes but quickly grew bored.
I have friends who remain comics enthusiasts, and they might love the detail in the 334 pages then 101 more in end sections of The Ten-Cent Plague. The histories I favor, however, do not name and biograph every last person who intersected with the main figures but are distinguished only as needed. I might have gotten all the info I’d like if this instead was a long magazine article. I trust Hajdu’s research, and his storytelling overall is clear. He does write like a newspaperman, linear and episodic, with little narrative style. Hajdu is a journalism professor at Columbia University.
This is not a proud part of American history. Hajdu sets the atmosphere clearly, the Truman and Eisenhower years, the Cold War, what from now looks like broad complacency, and with what would be called counterculture simmering underneath and ready to burst in the late 1960s. Hajdu’s epilogue is an interview with hippy cartoonist R. Crumb, rightfully given the last word.
Maybe I’m missing an overall analysis. Hajdu, however, never is reluctant to evaluate people or works or assign credit or blame. Yet he avoids any comparisons to our era of crime-encouraging rap music and vivid videogames — or how we got to this relatively free-flowing iPod era. Remember Tipper Gore’s often-mocked efforts to protect children beginning in 1985? Nobody effectively undermined the anti-comics leader, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, in the ’50s. (It’s likely that my late mom read Wertham or articles about him.)
And that makes for a good all-American story that would be unbelievable if it were not true.
* * *
A month ago Farrar Straus sent me this book, which I requested, having been assigned it by my paper to review. The publisher moved the release from May 25 to May 18, and the majors began running their reviews last week. Little Rock chose to run a wire service review today. I hate to waste my book review draft so I reshaped it into a book report for Brick. Now, I can read those big-boy reviews I’d been avoiding! -30-
