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

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

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
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Book Summary Information

Author: David Hajdu
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-18
ISBN: 0374187673
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Book Reviews of The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America

Book Review: A Book That Needed to be Written
Summary: 5 Stars

This is a book on the part of the history of American Comics that needed to be written.

I got into comics in the early 1960's in teh second grade in 1964 when I was able to sufficiently read.

Actually, I was interested in comics even before than. It started with "The Adventures of Superman" TV show, "The Lone Ranger,," and Walt Disney's "Zorro."

In my young pre-hool years, I remember trying to scrounge comic books from older kids and relatives hoping that they would be finished with them and not want them anymore.

I used to get my mother on a rare occassion to buy me a comic book as she reluctantly gave in saying that I could ot read them. I had a younger brother who then came along and took sadistic pleasure in destroying them.

In 1962, I was then enrolled into a neighborhood Catholic school. Even in 1962, the fallout of the Great Coic Book Scare still prevailed. Back then if you read comic books you would be in danger of being stigmatized as a mentally deffective moral degenerate.

I grew up in a neighborhood in Queens, New York, that back then was predominantly a white, Italian-American, working class neigborhood. You had your share of kids who were to become juvenile delinuents and "Wannabes" with some ending up in prison and ding from drug overdoses and whatever.

Dr. Fredrick Wertham who wrote the book "Seduction of the Innocents" blamed comic books for juvenile delinquency and for kids growing up and turning to crime and getting involved in other deviant and anti-social behavior.

Well, I knew a number of these kids from school and from the neighborhood. I can tell you this. These kids did not read comic books. To them, only "babies" and "faggots" read comic books and someone who had to have something wrong with them upstairs. So there goes another great big hole blown into Dr. Fredrick Wertham's theory.

The nuns who though at the neighborhood Catholic school I attended in what Dr. Fredrick Wertham preached abou the evils oc comic books. Along with what Dr. Fredrick Wertham said, they also feared that we might one day tie a red cape or blanket around out neck and then try to take a test flight off the top of a roof.

Then after all that, they would tell you to take out your Religion books and open to a certain page and tell us that today, we are going to talk about Samson who used his super strength to signle-handedly slay an army of Philasteins. This would leave me scratching my head and wondering.


Summary of The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America

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 story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told-until The Ten-Cent Plague. David Hajdu's remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority.

When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how-years before music-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.
The Ten-Cent Plague radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between "high" and "low" art. As he did with the lives of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington (in Lush Life) and Bob Dylan and his circle (in Positively 4th Street), Hajdu brings a place, a time, and a milieu unforgettably back to life.

Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: I may be alone here, but when I read Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a whole strata of American artists came to life for me. Ever since then I've been waiting for a book like David Hajdu's 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 Hajdu's 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, couldn't be more compelling in anyone else's 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

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