The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great
Comic-Book Scare and How It
Changed America by David Hajdu
A Book That Needed To Be Written
Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: I may be alone here, but when I
read Michael Chabons The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a
whole strata of American artists came to life for me. Ever since then Ive
been waiting for a book like David Hajdus 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 Hajdus 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, couldnt be more compelling in anyone elses 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
Personal Review: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book
Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu
55 years have passed since the climactic event portrayed in "The Ten-
Cent Plague", but it may as well have been 400 years. That's how alien
the comic book scare seems to today's reader. Hard to imagine that only a
little over half a century ago, the outcry over comic books led to mass
book-burning rallies and a virtual blacklist of artists. At issue were not the
harmless teenage hijinks of Archie Comics, and not the mildly subversive
goings-on in Carl Barks' Duckburg, but rather the "crime comics" (a broad
term covering detective stories, horror tales and romance comics) of the
1940s and '50s.
David Hajdu has written a remarkable tight of pop culture history, drawing
330 breezy pages from a singular moment in time. The prologue quickly
introduces us to a representative artist who'd soon lose her comics
livelihood to a figurative torch-wielding mob. The first two chapters quickly
set the stage through a summary of the first 40 years of American comics,
from "The Katzenjammer Kids" through Will Eisner and The Spirit. Hajdu
does a fine job drawing a straight line between the evolution from the
earliest newspaper strips to the crime comics of mid-century.
After that, Hajdu narrows his focus, and details a civil war between two
American factions: the largely Jewish immigrants in lower Manhattan
sweatshops who invented the modern mass-produced comic book, versus
God-fearing midwesterners seeking out Satan under their children's beds.
Hadju finds figuresheads on each side. There's Dr. Fredric Wertham, a
psychiatrist of dubious methodology (and previously seen in The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier & Clay). There's Sterling North, the flowery book
critic whose columns extolled the joy of (antiseptic) children's literature
while decrying comics as a "national disgrace". And finally there's William
Gaines, of EC Comics (and, later, Mad Magazine), who testified before the
Senate that a cover illustration of a severed head was in "good taste". In
the background, rural and suburban schools are holding mass comic book
burnings -- so soon after the Nuremberg rallies -- and censorship is
eagerly sought by the masses.
By the end of the book, the Senate subcommittee hearings have turned
the popular tide in favor of the anti-comics forces. Gaines is forced to first
bowdlerize his comics, and then cancel all his titles when he can't make
any sales. He finds solace in the continued success of Mad Magazine,
which used its status as a magazine rather than a comic to spread its
satire across a wide range of cultural targets. The introduction of the
Comics Code (first led, and then opposed by, Gaines) leads to black
comedy as Hajdu expertly highlights the nonsensical editorial decisions
that stripped all the "objectionable" material from the titles.

Because the book is about a single moment in time, a lot of material is left
uncovered -- such as the re-introduction of the superhero comics in the
1960s, this time capturing the college market and thus recapturing the
audience that had been lost to the Code as children a decade earlier, and
and then the rise of graphic novels in the 1980s and '90s. This story does
eventually have a happy ending, but Hajdu chooses to end on a somewhat
bittersweet note -- because that happy ending was a long time coming.
Hajdu instead concludes with a somewhat cheezy list of names of artists
who left the comics field after the Comics Code narrowed their job
opportunities -- this is not quite a blacklist and probably not as moving as
the author intended it to be. However, overall the book's a tremendous
success. And you can still buy glossy full-color reprints of some of EC's
most objectionable lines (such as Crime Suspenstories, Vol. 1 (EC
Archives) (v. 1)), while Dr. Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent is
thankfully long, long out of print.
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