The Not-So-Untold Story of the Great Comic-Book Scare
[Gene Kannenberg Jr. directs ComicsResearch.org, a bibliography of works about comics with information about other comics resources.]
David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) has been greeted mostly with glowing reviews. A lively read, The Ten-Cent Plague digs deeply into the social context surrounding the "comic-book panic" of the first half of the 20th century. The movement culminated in 1954 with dramatic televised Senate hearings and the subsequent establishment of the comic-book industry's self-regulatory organization, the Comics Magazine Association of America.
Hajdu's strategy, as he noted in a recent talk at the Cartoon Art Museum, in San Francisco, was to write a "war story." He stressed that he tried to be fair to both sides; indeed, his representations are far from one-dimensional. Still, this war story ultimately casts the anticomics movement as the antagonists against whom publishers and cartoonists struggle. The book's appendix, a list of more than 800 people who never again worked in comics, implies an incredible swath of damage. But without any context, apart from the book's biographical anecdotes, the list becomes a misleading rhetorical flourish.
The publisher touts the book as "the revelatory untold story of the battle over comic books," and, judging by the reviews, most book reviewers and media outfits aren't familiar with the tale. But the story has been told, and continues to be retold, in many contexts. It is well known by most scholars and aficionados of American comic books. According to fan folklore, Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent (Rinehart, 1954), the influential and infamous study of the dangers that comic books posed for the youth of America, and his sidekick Sen. Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat, stood as the twin archenemies of the comic book. The Comics Code was the Kryptonite that rendered an entire industry weak and impotent....
Read entire article at Gene Kannenberg Jr. in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) has been greeted mostly with glowing reviews. A lively read, The Ten-Cent Plague digs deeply into the social context surrounding the "comic-book panic" of the first half of the 20th century. The movement culminated in 1954 with dramatic televised Senate hearings and the subsequent establishment of the comic-book industry's self-regulatory organization, the Comics Magazine Association of America.
Hajdu's strategy, as he noted in a recent talk at the Cartoon Art Museum, in San Francisco, was to write a "war story." He stressed that he tried to be fair to both sides; indeed, his representations are far from one-dimensional. Still, this war story ultimately casts the anticomics movement as the antagonists against whom publishers and cartoonists struggle. The book's appendix, a list of more than 800 people who never again worked in comics, implies an incredible swath of damage. But without any context, apart from the book's biographical anecdotes, the list becomes a misleading rhetorical flourish.
The publisher touts the book as "the revelatory untold story of the battle over comic books," and, judging by the reviews, most book reviewers and media outfits aren't familiar with the tale. But the story has been told, and continues to be retold, in many contexts. It is well known by most scholars and aficionados of American comic books. According to fan folklore, Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent (Rinehart, 1954), the influential and infamous study of the dangers that comic books posed for the youth of America, and his sidekick Sen. Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee Democrat, stood as the twin archenemies of the comic book. The Comics Code was the Kryptonite that rendered an entire industry weak and impotent....