SKAD13's Full Review: David Hajdu - The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic...
David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux; $26) 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 of comic books -- an irony that only the victimized young readers seem to appreciate.
The story's climax -- as juicy as any comic-book twist -- comes at the nationwide broadcast of a Congressional hearing about comics. On one side sits a desperate Bill Gaines, trying to defend his life's work while hyped up on diet pills. On the other side, Senator Estes Kefauver, who ends up laying waste to the benign comic-book industry with the same intensity that he ended Joe McCarthy's Red-baiting career.
Just as comic books transcended their pulp origins to become pop art, so author Hajdu takes a seemingly trivial story and imbues it with passion and indignation. The book's pace is as feverish as its subject's. And it shows how the dismantling of the comic-book industry was, in the end, a ham-fisted reaction to some kids questioning the status quo.
When it comes to a First Amendment defense from an unlikely source, The Ten-Cent Plague ranks with the movie The People vs. Larry Flynt. It's a bracing read.
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