The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, Hajdu David

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.

David Hajdu is the author of Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn and Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina. He is the music critic for The New Republic, and he teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. An Eisner Award Nominee
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the YearA Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of the YearA Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
In The Ten-Cent Plague, David Hajdu looks at the rise and fall of comic books, the art defined by creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority. In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created--in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress--only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine.
The Ten-Cent Plague shows how--years before the rock and roll music of the 1950s--comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers. Hajdu aims to revise common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between high and low art. Horror and other raffish comics, and the campaign to stamp them out, are the subject of David Hajdus smart new book, The Ten-Cent Plague . . . Hajdu has consulted surviving artists and writers from the period, many of whom were unable to work again in the comics business after the crackdown. The result is a stylish, informed account that shows how easy it is to think fuzzily about other peoples pleasures . . . Hajdu evokes the era colorfully and wittily.--Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post Book World