Ten-Cent Plague
I recommended David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
when it was announced last spring. Now that I’ve read it I ought to give it the definitive thumbs-up. As with his Billy Strayhorn bio, Lush Life
, Hajdu weaves a ton of research into a compelling narrative, marked by an eye for telling detail. The book documents the comic book hysteria of the 1950s as part of an ongoing cycle of parental concern and official backlash traceable all the way back to the half-dime novels of the Victorian era. Frederic Wertham appears as a major figure in the story, but here is shown to be one signally self-publicizing component of a much larger movement. Histories of the comic book written by and for fans typically deal with all other genres as a sideshow to the rise, fall, and resurgence of costumed superheroes. Hajdu’s different angle allows a focus on other vastly popular genres other than the fan-favorite heroes and horrors. I hadn’t realized, for example, the extent to which pre-Code romance comics were as threatening to 50s social mores as anything aimed at boys. Hajdu sees the freewheeling comics of the early 50s as precursors to all the subversive pop cultural movements that followed. While he deplores the censoring hammer that drove dozens of idiosyncratic artists from public view, he also shows how completely inflammatory much of the material was. The vividly drawn set piece of the book is the confrontation staged by Bill Gaines, hopped up on naivety and Dexedrine, with his Senate committee tormentors.