The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Hajdu, David. The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Earlier this year, the last of the major comics publishers to use the Comics Code Authority dropped it in favor of their own rating standards. The seal of approval was one almost ubiquitous on newsstand comics. It lingered as sale shifted to comic book stores and older readers.

What led to the industry self-censorship represented by the little square seal is an interesting combination of social, political, and economic forces in American history. David Hajdu tells the story. (When The Ten-Cent Plague was published, major comics publishers were still using the seal.)

When comic strips first appeared in newspapers, the intent was to make the papers more appealing to the lower classes and immigrants who might not speak English, or even read. These cartoons appealed to the interest, problems and culture of this audience, along with other minorities, often thumbing their noses at the cultural establishment, the wealthy, political elites and others who had or represented power. As you might expect, the funnies had many detractors among the defenders of decent society.

This same countercultural element was transferred to comic books when they were invented in the 1930s. By the post-war years of the 1950s, the main countercultural was youth. People had been criticizing comics for their possible effects on children almost from the start, but the growing concern about juvenile delinquency (and possibly Communism) led to a successful campaign against comics. Rock and roll hadn’t been invented, so there wasn’t much else to blame.

Actually, a lot of the more reasonable explorations of the connections between comics reading and juvenile delinquency found it to be tenuous if it existed it all (delinquents read comics, but so did nearly every kid who could get an occasional dime). Detractors of comics thought they had evidence enough, especially Frederic Wertham, who’s Seduction of the Innocent added a sense of scientific respectability to the anti-comics camp.


The comics publishers reacted to save their industry from the wave of parental discontent and pending legislation. The Comics Code was a self-censorship standard like the film industries Hays Code, except much more restrictive. The code, and the forces that led up to it, almost killed the comics industry. It mostly eliminated the crime and horror comics that inspired the most ire through their excesses.

While Hajdu agrees that the crime and horror comics of the 1940s and early 1950s often had material that was unsuitable for children, he finds the roots of the anti-comics movement to be in the fundamental shift in culture between generations that occurred during the cold war. He also exhibits a lot of sympathy for the writers and artists that created comics, some of whom who left the arts altogether after the industry contracted.

Hajdu’s style is journalistic, like other works of popular history. The bibliography is extensive for those who are looking to make a study of comics. There is a touch of humor, which is bound to come up given the sometime goofy nature of comics and the ironies that abounded in the arguments both for and against the medium.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Golden Age of DC Comics by Daniels, Kid and Spear
Stan Lee by Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon

Waste and Want by Susan Strasser

An old proverb relates trash and treasure as a matter of perspective. In Waste and Want, Susan Strasser describes American’s changing perspectives on waste from the colonial era to our own day.

In the colonial and revolutionary period of American history, manufactured objects were rare and expensive. Repair and mending were common even among the wealthy because it was difficult and costly to replace objects. In addition, the various types of home industry practiced by both men and women equipped them with skills in handling materials that made them adept at repair. Even when and object was beyond repair, it parts, or the material it was made of, might be usefully repurposed themselves or as part of an assembly. This lack of goods and facility with handling materials made bricolage common. Because things had durable value, people had a sense of stewardship relating to them.

Strasser establishes this as a beginning state. The development of industry and consumerism led to a current state in which all of these have been reversed. We have an abundance of goods, and many of them are inexpensive. We work in factories and offices where we do not develop skills for repair, and particularly have lost familiarity with materials needed for practical bricolage. These and other forces, particularly those related to health and cleanliness, have resulted in waste being something of the home where additional value may be extracted to something that is the realm of specialists that is taken away and handled by government agencies or specialized companies.

There are many stages in this development. It is interesting to me that the value of household waste as raw materials American industry provided a mechanism for poor and rural people to purchase manufactured goods. Even so, as industrialization made more goods available, along with larger quantities of more manageable waste, household waste became less valuable, and reuse and recycling became associated with poverty.

By the end of the 1920s, consumer culture was established in America, and it reinforced the trends identified by Strasser.  Planned obsolescence was developed in the automotive industry, and along with the craze for fashion, it took hold for almost all consumer goods. Even during the Great Depression, when lack of credit and unemployment made doing it yourself attractive, there was an assumption that people had access to new and old consumer goods and their packaging. Even during this period of economic distress, demand for certain types of consumer goods grew. Thrift was reimaged for a consumer age. For instance, refrigerators became commonplace, and instead of being presented as luxury items they were sold on the notion of thrift, allowing housewives to save on food by keeping leftovers and buying in bulk.

People were encouraged to conserve and recycle to support the war effort during World War II. However, this did little to reverse changing attitudes that valued the new over the old and saw little value in trash. People had jobs and money, and wartime rationing created a pent up demand for goods that was unleased after the war. Disposable goods and packaging represented cleanliness and convenience; it was freedom from dirt and drudgery. There was no value in trash, which was taken away by collectors.

There were reactions against this even in the 1950s. They grew into the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, which were skeptical of corporations and consumerism. The environmental movement also grew out of this counterculture. Reuse of second-hand goods became more acceptable for even middle-class families, though few had the skills needed to rework these items to make them seem new or adapt them to current fashion. Little used goods were seen to have some value that could be recovered through yard sales. (I grew up on a stretch of highway that now boasts and annual 100 mile yard sale.)

This counterculture has not resulted in a broad return to a stewardship of things. Strasser suggests that a rising ethic of environmental or resource stewardship may lead to the mitigation of problems related to the abundant trash created by disposable and rapidly obsolete goods. There is no turning back, but we might find new reasons and ways to reduce use, reuse, and recycle.

Stasser, Susan. Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999.

Paperboy by Henry Petroski

Petroski, Henry. Paperboy: Confessions of a Future Engineer. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Henry Petroski is an engineering professor who is well known for his books on engineering and technology. Paperboy is a memoir of his boyhood.

This memoir is a reflection of the times, the 1950s, as well as the author’s life. It shows a microcosm of a nation recovering from World War II and gearing up for the space race. The paperboys of New York weren’t interested in reading the newspapers they delivered, so they weren’t consciously aware of the social forces at work around them. (Even so, Petroski uses headlines from the Long Island Press to show what was going on at the time.) A boy with Petroski’s talents might have gone into any number of things, but with Sputnik overhead, government policy and watchful teachers nudged him into engineering. It was a good fit.

Petroski doesn’t leave technology completely out of the picture. As a paperboy, he had to master the art of folding and flipping papers. He assembled and maintained his own bicycle. He watched his orderly uncle, an accountant, put together exactly what he needed to build an attic closet with no waist.

Young Petroski had many traits that would have made engineering attractive to him: curiosity about how things work, mechanical aptitude, facility with mathematics, some perfectionism, more pragmatism, ability to think both concretely and abstractly, appreciate that things are made and making involves choosing. I have known and worked with many engineers in my career in that profession and nearly all of them share at least a few of these traits with Petroski.

A particular part of Petroski’s school experience stands out to me because it illustrates how real life is different from a story. His high school algebra teacher, Mr. Duncan, took an immediate dislike to him, apparently because it picked up on algebra so easily. Duncan began to call Petroski “Herman Peterson,” provoked him and sent him out into the hall. The budding engineer sat in the hall, following the lessons through the door, and remaining the leading student in the class. This hardship continued until Petroski advanced into upper-class math courses. A story probably would have had some satisfying resolution, but real life experience involved just moving on.

In one section of his memoir, Petroski discusses newspaper titles. It’s the kind of list-making thing many engineers are prone to do. The weekly paper in my hometown was the Bloomfield Vindicator. I have never heard a name for newspaper that was cooler than Vindicator. I’m reminded by it of those show that were popular in the 1980s about a nameless stranger who comes into town to bring justice to oppressors of the downtrodden like The Equalizer, Stingray, and The Pretender (which may have been from the 1990s). A syndicate combined the Vindicator with another publication and given it the unimaginative title of North Stoddard Countian.


If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck
Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel
The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson
Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson
The Science of Leonardo by Fritjof Capra

Ed Wood Double Feature

Ed Wood is famous as one of the worst filmmakers of all time. That is an overstatement. Wood made some decent films (for the time, budget and type of films he was making) and some find even his bad movies to be entertaining. A couple of my favorite Wood films are illustrative.

I think Bride of the Monster (1956) is the first Ed Wood film I saw. I recall it showing on the Creature Feature, a late night film show broadcast out of Cape Girardeau and hosted by Misty Brew. Bride is not a bad movie. It’s about as good as a lot of low budget, sci-fi horror films from the 1950s.



In Bride, Bela Legosi plays an outcast scientist who intends to create a “race of atomic supermen” that will usher in a new age of his making, under his rule. His human experiments have not been successful and keeping ahead of the law and spies from his homeland led him to a remote American swamp. His animal experiments have been more successful, and his gigantic creation proves to be a useful way to dispose of the corpses of his unwilling human subjects. Mad science, nosy reporters, police, and spies crash in an atomic explosion of mayhem.

By contract, Night of the Ghouls (1958) has everything in it that is the worst of Wood. To start with, it seems to be a sequel to Bride, except that any continuity is accidental. Many of the actors are the same, but only two of the characters could are the same, Lobo (Tor Johnson) and Kelton the Cop (Paul Marco). There are constant reference to setting of the story and that strange things happened there once before, enough for me to think it’s referring to Bride, but they don’t exactly make sense and certainly aren’t necessary. I don’t know if issues with rights prevented Wood from making an outright sequel. I suspect his write-fast, film-fast style didn’t leave room for the careful checking of continuity a real sequel would require.



Another Woodism is the overuse of voiceover. The film begins and ends with soliloquies delivered from a coffin by newspaper psychic Criswell, which is entertaining in its goofy bombast. Criswell’s narrative continues through the film, though it is largely unnecessary. Wood is good enough to tell the story without the voiceover, but bad enough to use it anyway. Criswell delivers the lines with gusto, and possibly with thanks, for their better than most of the dialogue the other actors have to deal with.

Criswell narrates a section built on stock footage, which was a staple of low-budget and exploitation films and frequently used by Wood. The bad, and oddly entertaining, thing about this section is that it has practically nothing to do with the rest of the film. It’s an exploitation-style harangue on juvenile delinquency that depicts many young people dancing to rock and roll, racing cars and committing mostly petty crimes.

In Night, at least, Wood is not a good storyteller. He remains a great plotter though. A fake psychic set up shop to con wealthy clients who disparately desire to reach diseased spouses. It turns out he is actually very powerful medium who is unwittingly raising the dead from a nearby cemetery. These ghouls can’t stay in the realm of the living for long and they’re not going back to their graves alone. That could be an awesome horror story, but in Wood’s hand it doesn’t quite make it.

By the way, the malevolent medium of Night is named Dr. Acula. That is right, Wood straight up names a character Dr. Acula.

If you like old sci-fi horror films, you may like Bride of the Monster, which is typical of its low-budget ilk. If you want to see a bad movie that entertains in spite of, or possibly because of, its myriad flaws, look at Night of the Ghouls.



If your interested in these films, you may also be interested in
Bedlam
Isle of the Dead

In Memory Yet Green by Isaac Asimov

When I was a kid, my interest in science fiction was fed by reading many short stories from the heyday of science fiction magazines in the 1940s and 1950s. I particularly remember reading I, Robot, a collection of stories written by Isaac Asimov. (The book is still in bookstores after more than four decades. Will Smith is on the cover; his 2004 movie of the same title was based on one of the stories.)

Asimov wrote an extensive autobiography. The first volume, In Memory Yet Green, covers the first 34 years of his life. As you would expect, his life in that timeframe was similar to many other. He grew up, completed his formal education, started his career and started a family.

Like other famous people, Asimov had fortunate timing, talent, and willingness to work hard to achieve something. He is best known for his achievements as a science fiction writer. Writing was not his sole profession during this part of his life, but he was a fairly prolific writer and was well known in science fiction circles. He had a reputation in science fiction fandom before he ever published a fiction story. He was a fan of the early science fiction magazines and regularly wrote letters to them. He made friends with other fans, several of whom became successful writers along with him, particularly fellow Futurians.

As he put time into writing stories, his participation in fandom waned. His other career as an academic chemist also took up a lot of time. Though it is well known among science fiction fans, others may not be aware that had a Ph.D. in chemistry and was a professor at a medical school. He co-wrote two biochemistry textbooks during this period.

The book covers many aspects of his life, both professional and personal. He begins with his birth in Russia and ends as a husband (to Gertrude) and father (to David) on the verge of a career transition. In between he lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, and many other upheavals of the first half of the 20^th Century. Asimov shares his experiences and views of these events.

Asimov’s style in his autobiography is much as it is in his other writings: straightforward and often jovial. He is not shy about his accomplishments, but he is often humorously self-deprecating and willing to confess to his boneheaded moments.

The book will probably appeal mostly to science fiction fans. Asimov got in on the ground floor. He knew many of the other writers, editors, and publishers of his generation including Ian and Betty Ballantine, John Campbell, L. Sprague de Camp, Lester Del Rey, Robert Heinlein and Frederik Pohl.

If you’re interested in reading this book, you may also be interested in

The Ancient Engineers by L. Sprague de Camp

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein

Asimov, Isaac. In Memory Yet Green: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954. New York: Doubleday, 1979.

Seduction of the Innocent by Max Allan Collins

Max Allan Collins takes the name of his book, Seduction of the Innocent, from the title of a notorious book by psychologist Frederic Wertham. The original was anti-comics propaganda that falsely linked comic book reading to juvenile delinquency. Collins’ novel is a pulpy crime story in which a stand-in for Wertham is murdered.

Fans of comics or pulp culture will find a lot to enjoy in this book. There are many ways to experience the frisson of recognition because many of the characters are based—to varying degrees—on real-life comic book artists, writers and publishers from the 1950s, when Wertham’s screed was published. Even the senate hearings headed by Estes Kefauver are featured in the course of the book.

The real Wertham was not murdered. Collins is careful not to make his stand-in too repulsive He acknowledges that Wertham did a lot of good work, even if his research tying comics to youth crime was bad.

The tone of the book is often silly, as you might expect from a tongue-in-cheek fictionalization of silver age comics publishing. It is still hardboiled, so there is plenty of sex and violence to go around.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Big Con by David W. Maurer

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

The Hunter adapted by Darwyn Cook

In Memory Yet Green by Isaac Asimov

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Suggestible You by Erik Vance

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Will Eisner’s The Spirit by Darwin Cook

Collins, Max Allan. Seduction of the Innocent. London: Hard Case Crime, 2013.

Glossary

One of the most important books in a reader’s library is the dictionary. Here are a few words I’ve had to look up in my reading or that I thought were noteworthy.

Amended March 7, 2011

A

Acheron – a river from Greek mythology over which the dead were ferried by Charon

adamantine – hard, unyielding (the last syllable may be pronounced like teen, tin or tine, which could come in handy for rhyming)

aerolith, n. – a meteor (such as on might see in the empyrean)

aliquot – an adjective that describes something that is an exact divisor, or factor
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, OneLook

For example, when you factor a number, such as 60, you find its aliquot parts, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30.

angstrom, n. – unit of length equal to one ten-millionth of a millimeter (10-7 mm), mainly used to express electromagnetic wavelengths (named for Swedish astronomer Andes Johann Ångström)
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, OneLook

aprioristic, adj. – preconceived, or considered valid independent of observation or evidence

“The grid for historical interpretation is more than something that facilitates the selection and interpretation of evidence: it offers an all-encompassing aprioristic view of reality into which the phenomena of history must be made to fit, whether by fair means or foul.”

-Carl R. Trueman, Histories and Fallacies

Argus – a giant with 100 eyes from Greek mythology

C

cagoule – a hooded, weatherproof jacket
Cambridge Dictionary, TheFreeDictionary

canescent – downy, as in the whitish or grayish down on some plants
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

caul – part of the amnion sometimes covering the head of a child at birth
Dictionary.com, OneLook

celebutante – a young woman who is famous for no discernable reason (from celebrity + debutante)

cicerone – a guide for sightseers (pronounced with a long e at the end)

cloaca – a sewer
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

concertina – noun musical instrument resembling an accordion with hexagonal bellow and button-keys – verb to fold or collapse like a concertina
Dictionary.com, OneLook

crepuscular – resembling or active at twilight
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

cuprous – containing univalent copper
Dictionary.com, OneLook

curlew, n. – a shorebird with a long beak that curves down, of the genus Numenius

D

dalton, n. – unit of mass used to express the mass of atomic and subatomic particles equal to 1/12 the mass of the carbon-12 atom; another name for an atomic mass unit (named for English chemist John Dalton)
TheFreeDictionary, Encarta, YourDictionary

disembogue – pour out
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

demimonde, n. – women with wealthy lovers who have lost standing in society because of indiscretions or promiscuity; courtesans or prostitutes (an individual woman of this class is a demimondaine)
Dictionary.com

“Humiliation no longer threatens the individual who hasn’t read a book, but the one who has; reading is seen as a degrading task that may be left to a woman of the demimonde.”
-Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

doyenne – a woman with seniority in her profession or organization (feminine form of doyen)

“Sue Carter of the University of California at Irvine is famous as the doyenne of research on this potent hormone of attachment [oxytocin], which she has studied extensively in the prairie vole.”
-Stephen Post & Jill Neimark, Why Good Things Happen to Good People

E

elegiac, adj. - expressing sorrow or mourning

empyrean – sky

“The very empyrean seemed to be a secret.”
-G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

endogenous – internally originated
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster, TheFreeDictionary, Encarta

“Because the internally focused [performance assessment and evaluation] frameworks of the [community water system] sector are based on endogenous measures of performance, they narrowly asses performance in terms of core processes, which differ by [community water system].”
-Jeffrey W. Rogers & Garrick E. Louis. “A standard efficiency metric for evaluation performance of community water systems.” Journal AWWA 97.10 (2005): 79-80.

F

fissiparous, adj. – tending to split into factions

“Marxism has proved as fissiparous a philosophy as it has a political ideology.”

-Carl R. Truman, Histories and Fallacies

G

ghee – clarified butter
Dictionary.com, OneLook

glaucous - greenish blue or bluish green
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

I

inanition, n. – exhaustion from lack of nourishment; lethargy

L

lacuna – missing part (the middle syllable is pronounced like queue)

Laocöon, n. – Trojan priest who warned against accepting the horse left by the Greeks (Trojan horse); he and his sons were killed by serpent bites

lido – a beach resort or open-air swimming pool
Dictionary.com, OneLook



M

mantic – related to or having the power of divination
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

meretricious, adj. – having a flashy or vulgar allure, insincere or pretentious; characteristic of a prostitute

moue – a pout
Dictionary.com, OneLook

multitexting – the rude and dangerous activity of reading and writing text message on mobile communication devices, including e-mail message in the case of crackberry addicts, while engaged in other activities such as walking, driving, attending meetings and dining with others (from multitasking)

O

ouroborus, n. – a symbol of a snake or dragon eating its tail
Dictionary.com, OneLook

outré, adj. – unconventional or bizarre

P

patulous – spreading
Dictionary.com, TheFreeDictionary, Merriam-Webster Online, OneLook, YourDictionary

"Above the spire of St Paul’s, patulous white clouds deepened to a shade reminiscent of overwashed socks."
-Christopher Fowler, The Water Room

phenology – the study of the timing of recurring natural events
Websters, Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster


plover, n. – a shorebird having a thick neck, compact body, and pigeon-like beak, of the family Charadriidae, or a similar bird

prolegomenon, n. – scholarly preface (you can tell it is scholarly by its length)

putsch, n. – a revolt or uprising
Merriam-Webster, Encarta

R

retrosexual, n. – a man who cares little for or minimally attends to his appearance (i.e., the opposite of a metrosexual), or a man who adopts an old-fashioned masculine style (especially the suit-and-hat style of the 1950s and 1960s)
Merriam-Webster

S

sesquipedalian, adj. – multisyllabic
Merrian-Webster.com

“Do not build monuments to obfuscatory sesquipedalian tergiversation.”
-Elizabeth Slatkin in How to Write a Manual

sibilant, adj. - hissing

soidisant – self-styled, so-called, pretended (from French and pronounced in something of that style, i.e. swa-dee-zahn’)


spoor, n. – track or trail, especially of a wild animal
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster.com

“The victory always lies in our hunger for the spiritual intimacy of our union with Christ. In some since it is more than a hunger, it is a stalking—pursuing God as a safari tracks the spoor of big game”
-Calvin Miller, Into the Depths of God

stoat – the European ermine, Mustela erminea
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online

suspire, v. – to utter with sighing breaths
Wordnik.com, Yahoo! Education

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame:
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
-T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

syncretistic, adj. – attempting the reconciliation of opposing principles, practices or parties

“Catholicism’s commitment to the developing cult of the saints was surly one of its great strengths during the church’s massive expansion during the fourth and fifth centuries, and the winning strategy of a somewhat syncretistic pattern of handling folk religion right down into the fifteenth century.”

-Carl R. Trueman, Histories and Fallacies

T

tergiversation, n. – a constantly changing, unclear or misleading opinion or attitude
OneLook.com



threnody, n. – a song of lamentation
traduce, v.t. – to speak maliciously or falsely, to slander or defame

V

viridescent – greenish
Dictionary.com, OneLook

vulpine – fox-like
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster Online


W

whinge, v. – to cry, to complain, to whine
Dictionary.com, Merriam-Webster

X

xanthic – yellowish
Dictionary.com, Dict.org, The Free Dictionary, Webster’s Online, Your Dictionary