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
