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.
This meticulous exploration into comics and the censorship campaigns of the late 1940s and 1950s proves interesting and accessible to even neophytes of comics. Hajdu reveals a complicated and controversial history interlacing public opinion and "research" on the effects of comics by cultural critics such as Sterling North and Frederic Wertham with interviews of artists, publishers and consumers of comics at the time. Stefan Rudnicki's deep gravely voice with its smooth release and pace compliments the sometimes exhaustive Hajdu. However, Rudnicki's quoting voice can be both tiresome and questionable as he instills accents that are not necessarily suggestive from the text, and often they are indistinguishable from other similarly accented voices. Surprisingly, though the topic is highly visual in nature, listeners won't necessarily feel they are missing out on the illustrations and photos in the book. Simultaneous release with the FSG hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 10). (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Tarnish still lingers on the graphic narrative from anticomics crusades peaking in the 1950s. Remembering the past will hopefully prevent a replay, and this detailed history by Hajdu (Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña) fills the bill admirably as a prompt. Several trends powered the crusades: a bright and talented but ignored out-class working in comics, a rising youth culture before television and rock music, a national Cold War witch-hunt mentality, and the prewar intelligentsia's desire to retain their cultural hegemony over all ages and ethnicities. Comics took serious critical heat as early as 1906, but it was the escalation of crime and horror comics in the 1940s and 1950s that became linked to "juvenile delinquency" (especially by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham) and led to legislation, book burnings, the Comics Code Authority, and the evisceration of the industry, with hundreds of people put out of work. Hajdu documents this painful, fascinating story and includes over 80 pages of notes and sources. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. See also Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign, edited by John Lent, for reverberations around the world, and Bart Beaty's Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. [See Prepub Alert, LJ11/15/07.]
—Martha Cornog
"Marvelous . . . a staggeringly well-reported account of the men and women who created the comic book, and the backlash of the 1950s that nearly destroyed it....Hajdu’s important book dramatizes an early, long-forgotten skirmish in the culture wars that, half a century later, continues to roil."--Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A-)
"Incisive and entertaining . . . This book tells an amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book’s imagination."--Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"A well-written, detailed book . . . Hajdu’s research is impressive."--Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
"Crammed with interviews and original research, Hajdu’s book is a sprawling cultural history of comic books."--Matthew Price, Newsday
"To those who think rock 'n' roll created the postwar generation gap, David Hajdu says: Think again. Every page of The Ten-Cent Plague evinces [Hajdu’s] zest for the 'aesthetic lawlessness' of comic books and his sympathetic respect for the people who made them. Comic books have grown up, but Hajdu’s affectionate portrait of their rowdy adolescence will make readers hope they never lose their impudent edge."--Wendy Smith, Chicago Tribune
"A vivid and engaging book."--Louis Menand, The New Yorker
"David Hajdu, who perfectly detailed the Dylan-era Greenwhich Village scene in Positively 4th Street, does the same for the birth and near death (McCarthyism!) of comic books in The Ten-Cent Plague." --GQ
"Sharp . . . lively . . . entertaining and erudite . . . David Hajdu offers captivating insights into America’s early bluestocking-versus-blue-collar culture wars, and the later tensions between wary parents and the first generation of kids with buying power to mold mass entertainment."--R. C. Baker, The Village Voice
"Hajdu doggedly documents a long national saga of comic creators testing the limits of content while facing down an ever-changing bonfire brigade. That brigade was made up, at varying times, of politicians, lawmen, preachers, medical minds, and academics. Sometimes, their regulatory bids recalled the Hays Code; at others, it was a bottled-up version of McCarthyism. Most of all, the hysteria over comics foreshadowed the looming rock 'n' roll era."--Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times
"A compelling story of the pride, prejudice, and paranoia that marred the reception of mass entertainment in the first half of the century."--Michael Saler, The Times Literary Supplement (London)
The story that The Ten-Cent Plague rehearses has until now been largely the concern of the genre's obsessive enthusiasts. In Hajdu's capable hands, the tale rises to the level of true social history, documenting an early battle in the culture wars that continue to bedevil us today. The first "comic books" produced in the 1930s were compilations of short strips that had already appeared in newspapers. These sequential narrative panels were not uniquely American, but they took off at the turn of the century in the age of Pulitzer and Hearst, who ferociously fought for readers. By the time publishers saw a market for reprints, certain strips had proved more than disposable entertainment and had begun to garner critical praise. Gilbert Seldes, in his seminal celebration of American popular culture, The Seven Lively Arts (1924), includes a groundbreaking appreciation of George Herriman's Krazy Kat, the surreal and slangy antics of an androgynous cat and mouse. And Sunday color supplement readers encountered all sorts of brilliant graphics, from Winsor McCay's lush dreamscapes to Hal Foster's realist-style adventure tales.
The trouble began when comic book publishers ran out of reprint material and solicited new artwork. Unlike the more sophisticated newspaper strips, which many adults admired, the cheap (ten-cent) magazines, printed on newsprint, bound with staples, and sporting a wrap-around color cover, were pitched to kids. So the mostly craven publishers and printers indulged pretty much anything that would sell, paying little attention to subject and even less to style. The irony, of course, is that a whole new generation of talented artists and writers emerged from this wide-open field. As the children of immigrants, many of the young creators felt excluded from the respectable world of fine art and commercial illustration. The low-paying comic book industry nurtured talents as diverse as the Bronx-born Will Eisner, a true genius of the form who challenged comic narrative conventions in his pathbreaking series, The Spirit, featuring a hip post-superhero crime buster; and Charles Biro, a lowbrow hack from Manhattan's Yorkville who churned out sleazy crime titles faster than he could copy the art from other sources. His Crime Does Not Pay, derived from lurid tabloid accounts of actual crimes, engendered countless imitations, with such titles as Crime Can't Win, Crime Must Lose, and All-True Crimes Cases. As the superhero market slowed own (at roughly 1 million copies per month), the crime titles thrived, despite -- parents would later say because of -- the glorification of gangsterism.
Outrage over superheroes and gangster stories inspired numerous social watchdogs to action -- parish priests sermonized over comic books' alleged immorality; parents organized public burnings of titles they thought undermined their authority; and politicians considered banning books outright. By 1948, with comic books selling through the roof, the industry made a few gestures towards self-control, emulating the example of Hollywood, which responded to calls for censorship by establishing the Hays production code, with its self-regulations concerning the depictions of crime, sex, and general morality. The Association of Comics Magazine Publishers (ACMP) came up with a number of reasonable suggestions, but only a third of publishers joined the organization, representing less than a third of the 300 titles published monthly. So rules against "sexy, wanton comics" and "scenes of sadistic torture" -- to name just two -- went unheeded. In fact, a number of publishers stepped things up a notch. Biro, for one, expanded into romance titles that featured lots of "headlight" shots; that is, drawings of sultry women with large breasts.
Women's magazines and religious organizations continued to rail against comics into the '50s, but the real showdown came at midcentury, as government stepped into the breach. It wasn't the first time -- local politicians across the country had modest success imposing bans, often focusing their attentions on the means of distribution, the neighborhood newsstand or stationery store. In 1950, a Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver, the legendary reformer from Tennessee, considered the issue of juvenile delinquency, which many alleged resulted from the increased reading of crime comics among teenagers. This early attempt to link cause and effect petered out, and those testifying made it clear they only feared crime books and not newspaper strips or the many funny animal titles on the market. But waiting in the wings were two formidable foes: Dr. Wertham and William Gaines, the young owner of Entertaining Comics (E.C.), a company he inherited from his father, M. C. Gaines, the man often credited with publishing the first comic book back in the '30s.
Together with editor and artist Al Feldstein, another child of New York City immigrants, Gaines created what many (including me) believe to be the finest line of comic book titles ever published. Under their stewardship, E.C. turned from the Bible stories, cowboy tales, and silly titles for "tiny tots" that M.C. published. His educated son wanted to try something new -- he and Feldstein created the science fiction titles Weird Science and Weird Fantasy and the hugely successful horror books The Haunt of Fear, The Vault of Horror, and Tales from the Crypt. The key to their success, as it was for other artists, was their youth -- these were comics written by young people for young people. Gaines soon hired another local boy, the brilliant Harvey Kurtzman, to edit the highly realistic and carefully researched war titles Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat. Kurtzman also developed the company's first humor title, Mad, which for its first 20-plus issues was a comic book, not the magazine it is today. In its early days, Mad featured ingenious parodies of other comics ("Superduperman," "Starchie") and goofy illustrations of popular poems ("The Face on the Barroom Floor," "The Raven"). Soon, its scathing criticism of the consumer culture supplanted the more harmless fare. In any case, when everything came to a head in 1954-55, E.C. comics would be at the center of the ruckus.
In 1954, Wertham published his much-heralded volume, Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth. This anecdotal study, with no footnotes or bibliography or index, indicted an entire industry. Nothing was spared: superheroes were found to be fascist (Superman), homosexual (Batman), and sadomasochistic (Wonder Woman). Crime comics, in Wertham's view, lead directly to criminal behavior, and he illustrates this with stories of juvenile misdeeds, all supposedly inspired by what they read in comics. He also claims that comics create nothing but contempt for authority and inserts in the middle of his book a number of visual illustrations, mostly single frames from comics, pulled almost entirely out of context. Prominent among his examples were panels from E.C. drawn by two of its very best artists: Jack Davis's grisly, humorous drawing of a baseball game played with body parts, and Johnny Craig's gory depiction of a hanged man.
Outraged, Gaines counterattacked, openly mocking Wertham in his comic book editorials, and offering to testify when comics again became the subject of government hearings. Only this time, the hearings succeeded. Gaines made a mess of his testimony, while Wertham was given a wide berth. The industry caved; most publishers quit; and, in Hajdu's estimation, some 800 artists and writers looked for work elsewhere. The "Comics Code of Authority," a much more detailed pamphlet of dos and don'ts than the earlier ACMP code, came into full effect -- no book without this certificate of decency printed in its upper corner would be distributed to newsagents. But Gaines had the last laugh: by turning Mad into a magazine, he avoided regulation and created one of the most lucrative titles in publishing history. And in Hajdu's sound estimate, Gaines and the many talents he discovered and nurtured helped create the best of postwar popular culture.
Hajdu surveys a wide landscape with great narrative skill, and he peppers his text with the testimony of numerous artists and editors on both sides of the cultural divide. He also tracks down some of the kids who were coerced into the many comic book burnings across the country, and to a person they regret their participation. But I think Hajdu errs in some of his political judgments, for Wertham was far from the right-wing scourge comics fans have depicted. The founder of a much-praised psychiatric clinic in Harlem, Wertham shared the left-wing scorn for popular culture common among German immigrant intellectuals, including the well-known Marxists of the Frankfurt School. My copy of the rare first edition of The Seduction of the Innocent comes with a glowing review, pasted on the endpapers, by none other than C. Wright Mills, the darling sociologist of the New Left who, along with many lefties of the time, considered mass culture a capitalist corruption. We know better now, perhaps, and Hajdu rightly faults Wertham's backward and unscientific reasoning, even if he misinterprets the doctor's motives. When comic books for adults reemerged in the '60s and after, many artists cited the influence and inspiration of E.C. in particular. Comic books for grown-ups -- from serious graphic novels to sexually charged fantasy titles -- are here to stay, even if they haven't all outgrown their lowbrow and juvenile origins. --Thomas DePietro
Thomas DePietro, a former contributing editor of Kirkus Reviews, has also published in Commonweal, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review. He recently edited Conversations with Don DeLillo, and his book on Kingsley Amis is forthcoming in 2008.
