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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 bold, pulpy pages of comic books. The Ten-Cent Plague explores this cultural emergence and its fierce backlash while challenging common notions of the divide between “high” and “low” art.
David Hajdu reveals how comics, years before the rock-and-roll revolution, brought on a clash between postwar children and their prewar parents. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics became the targets of a raging generational culture divide. They were burned in public bonfires, outlawed in certain cities, and nearly destroyed by a series of televised Congressional hearings. Yet their creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority would have a lasting influence.
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 bold, pulpy pages of comic books. The Ten-Cent Plague explores this cultural emergence and its fierce backlash while challenging common notions of the divide between “high” and “low” art.
David Hajdu reveals how comics, years before the rock-and-roll revolution, brought on a clash between postwar children and their prewar parents. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics became the targets of a raging generational culture divide. They were burned in public bonfires, outlawed in certain cities, and nearly destroyed by a series of televised Congressional hearings. Yet their creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority would have a lasting influence.
Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki
David HajduUnabridged — 11 hours, 50 minutes
Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki
David HajduUnabridged — 11 hours, 50 minutes
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 bold, pulpy pages of comic books. The Ten-Cent Plague explores this cultural emergence and its fierce backlash while challenging common notions of the divide between “high” and “low” art.
David Hajdu reveals how comics, years before the rock-and-roll revolution, brought on a clash between postwar children and their prewar parents. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics became the targets of a raging generational culture divide. They were burned in public bonfires, outlawed in certain cities, and nearly destroyed by a series of televised Congressional hearings. Yet their creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority would have a lasting influence.
The Ten-Cent Plague is the third book by David Hajdu to take a subject suitable for fans' hagiography and turn it into something of much wider interest…this book tells an amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book's imagination.
—The New York Times
The meticulously researched evidence of how easily America can be gulled into trashing its defining ideals in the name of Americanism—as if we needed any reminders—are among the highlights of Hajdu's book…The Ten-Cent Plague is a worthy addition to the canon of comic-book literature: a super effort, if not a superduper one.
—The New York Times Book Review
Horror and other raffish comics, and the campaign to stamp them out, are the subject of David Hajdu's smart new book, The Ten-Cent Plague (one thin dime being the price of the average comic in those days). 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 people's pleasures…Hajdu evokes the era colorfully and wittily.
—The Washington Post
This meticulous exploration into comics and the censorship campaigns of the late 1940s and 1950s proves interesting and accessible to even neophytes of comics. Hajdu reveals a complicated and controversial history interlacing public opinion and "research" on the effects of comics by cultural critics such as Sterling North and Frederic Wertham with interviews of artists, publishers and consumers of comics at the time. Stefan Rudnicki's deep gravely voice with its smooth release and pace compliments the sometimes exhaustive Hajdu. However, Rudnicki's quoting voice can be both tiresome and questionable as he instills accents that are not necessarily suggestive from the text, and often they are indistinguishable from other similarly accented voices. Surprisingly, though the topic is highly visual in nature, listeners won't necessarily feel they are missing out on the illustrations and photos in the book. Simultaneous release with the FSG hardcover (Reviews, Dec. 10). (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Tarnish still lingers on the graphic narrative from anticomics crusades peaking in the 1950s. Remembering the past will hopefully prevent a replay, and this detailed history by Hajdu (Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña) fills the bill admirably as a prompt. Several trends powered the crusades: a bright and talented but ignored out-class working in comics, a rising youth culture before television and rock music, a national Cold War witch-hunt mentality, and the prewar intelligentsia's desire to retain their cultural hegemony over all ages and ethnicities. Comics took serious critical heat as early as 1906, but it was the escalation of crime and horror comics in the 1940s and 1950s that became linked to "juvenile delinquency" (especially by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham) and led to legislation, book burnings, the Comics Code Authority, and the evisceration of the industry, with hundreds of people put out of work. Hajdu documents this painful, fascinating story and includes over 80 pages of notes and sources. Highly recommended for all public and academic libraries. See also Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Postwar Anti-Comics Campaign, edited by John Lent, for reverberations around the world, and Bart Beaty's Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. [See Prepub Alert, LJ11/15/07.]
—Martha Cornog
A vivid and engaging book.” —Louis Menand, The New Yorker
“David Hajdu, who perfectly detailed the Dylan-era Greenwhich Village scene in Positively 4th Street, does the same for the birth and near death (McCarthyism!) of comic books in The Ten-Cent Plague.” —GQ
“Who knew? The right was focused on the Red Menace and the left on the Red Scare. But, if you want to understand what was really going on in the mad, mad, mad world of the 1950's you should read David Hajdu's hilarious and harrowing account of The Great Comic Book Scare. Hajdu's tale is lurid, absurd, existential, weird, and scary, and contains real-life superheros and supervillains, and there is nothing funny about it.” —Victor Navasky, author of Naming Names
“THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE is about the best account yet of comics in America, an instant classic of cultural history.” —Geoffrey O'Brien, author of Sonata for Jukebox
“Every once in a while, moral panic, innuendo, and fear bubble up from the depths of our culture to create waves of destructive indignation and accusation. David Hajdu's fascinating new book tracks one of the stranger and most significant of these episodes, now forgotten, with exactness, clarity, and serious wit, which is the best kind. He illuminates the lives of his protagonists — from pompous, on-the-make censors to cracked comic book geniuses — with his own graphic powers, as well as his intense intellectual curiosity. The book is a rarity, vividly depicting a noirish 1950's America but without a trace of irony or nostalgia.” —Sean Wilentz, Professor of History, Princeton University
“Marvelous . . . a staggeringly well-reported account of the men and women who created the comic book, and the backlash of the 1950s that nearly destroyed it....Hajdu's important book dramatizes an early, long-forgotten skirmish in the culture wars that, half a century later, continues to roil.” —Jennifer Reese, Entertainment Weekly (Grade: A-)
“Incisive and entertaining . . . This book tells an amazing story, with thrills and chills more extreme than the workings of a comic book's imagination.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times
“A well-written, detailed book . . . Hajdu's research is impressive.” —Bob Minzesheimer, USA Today
“Crammed with interviews and original research, Hajdu's book is a sprawling cultural history of comic books.” —Matthew Price, Newsday
“To those who think rock 'n' roll created the postwar generation gap, David Hajdu says: Think again. Every page of The Ten-Cent Plague evinces [Hajdu's] zest for the 'aesthetic lawlessness' of comic books and his sympathetic respect for the people who made them. Comic books have grown up, but Hajdu's affectionate portrait of their rowdy adolescence will make readers hope they never lose their impudent edge.” —Wendy Smith, Chicago Tribune
“Sharp . . . lively . . . entertaining and erudite . . . David Hajdu offers captivating insights into America's early bluestocking-versus-blue-collar culture wars, and the later tensions between wary parents and the first generation of kids with buying power to mold mass entertainment.” —R. C. Baker, The Village Voice
“Hajdu doggedly documents a long national saga of comic creators testing the limits of content while facing down an ever-changing bonfire brigade. That brigade was made up, at varying times, of politicians, lawmen, preachers, medical minds, and academics. Sometimes, their regulatory bids recalled the Hays Code; at others, it was a bottled-up version of McCarthyism. Most of all, the hysteria over comics foreshadowed the looming rock 'n' roll era.” —Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times
“A compelling story of the pride, prejudice, and paranoia that marred the reception of mass entertainment in the first half of the century.” —Michael Saler, The Times Literary Supplement (London)"
Thanks to narrator Stefan Rudnicki, other books on the history of comic books can’t even touch THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE. Rudnicki’s steely narration of the Great Comic Book Scare of 1953-54 will raise the hackles of any freethinking American. In the belief that comic books would engender antisocial behavior in young readers, a censorship campaign developed that ruined artists’ careers and destroyed publishing companies. There was even a Senate hearing. With measured tones, Rudnicki delivers the author’s answer to the question of how things could go so wrong in a country with so much. The book is outstanding, even for those who don’t love comic books, because it demonstrates how the Baby Boomer generation first started questioning the values of their parents. Comics were crushed, but a few years later they were reborn better than ever. M.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
| BN ID: | 2940169719390 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/02/2008 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
For more than fifty years after that, Winkleman made no mention of the fact that she had had artwork prominently published as Janice Valleau. Her daughter Ellen grew up reading comic books without knowing that her mother had once helped create them.
In 2004, the Winklemans' living room held seventy-four paintings-vigorous watercolor seascapes with violent waves, rendered in heavy blues and blacks; an acrylic of two seagulls suspended in flight, positioned upright in a golden-brown sky and surrounded by other gulls darting about them in every direction; watercolor after watercolor of old sailing ships, moldering in dry dock; a few abstracts of angular shapes and patterns done in pastel; portraits of exotic, alluring young women, one of them topless, with her face either unfinished or painted over. The images-at once lovely and tortured, all skillfully done but madly varied-could occupy a graduate art student or a psychoanalyst for some time.
At age eighty-one, Winkleman was a fragile woman, weakened by age and illness, though she still painted when she felt up to it, usually one or two days each week. "I like art-it's important to me," she said in a small but firm voice. Her eyes were bright behind grand, squarish glasses that covered most of her face. She sat straight-backed in a thin-cushioned metal chair that went with the desk in a half-room that also had her easel and taboret, a few boxes of art supplies, and a tea set. Her hands formed a teepee on her lap. She wore a pressed linen house dress and well-used tennis shoes, and she kept her legs crossed tightly with her calves angled back under the chair, as if to hide the shoes. Hanging in a frame on the wall to her right was the original pen-and-ink art to the first page of a Blackhawk comic-book story drawn by one of her old studio mates, Reed Crandall. In the days when they were working together, Winkleman had sneaked the page home in her portfolio, because she admired Crandall's dynamic compositions and sure line.
"I wanted to be a magazine illustrator, but I loved comics, too," she said, pointing her teepee toward the Blackhawk page. "I would have been happy being in any kind of art at all."
Why, then, had she stopped working professionally half a century earlier? The paintings all over her house show that Winkleman had the skill and the versatility to have done commercial illustration. She had the experience in comics and the affection for the medium to have continued in that field. With the imagination she applied to some of her canvases, she might even have pursued fine art professionally. Why not?
"My God," she said. She separated her hands and slapped them on her lap, then slowly brought them back together. "I couldn't go back out there-I was scared to death. Don't you know what they did to us?"
In the mid-1940s, when Janice Valleau was thriving as an artist for Quality Comics, the comic book was the most popular form of entertainment in America. Comics were selling between eighty million and a hundred million copies every week, with a typical issue passed along or traded to six to ten readers, thereby reaching more people than movies, television, radio, or magazines for adults. By 1952, more than twenty publishers were producing nearly 650 comics titles per month, employing well over a thousand artists, writers, editors, letterers, and others-among them women such as Valleau, as well as untold members of racial, ethnic, and social minorities who turned to comics because they thought of themselves or their ideas as unwelcome in more reputable spheres of publishing and entertainment.
Created by outsiders of various sorts, comics gave voice to their makers' fantasies and discontent in the brash vernacular of cartoon drawings and word balloons, and they spoke with special cogency to young people who felt like outsiders in a world geared for and run by adults. In the forties, after all, the idea of youth culture as it would later be known-as a vast socioeconomic system comprising modes of behavior and styles of dress, music, and literature intended primarily to express independence from the status quo-had not yet formed; childhood and young adulthood were generally considered states of subadulthood, phases of training to enter the orthodoxy. Comic books were radical among the books of their day for being written, drawn, priced, and marketed primarily for and directly to kids, as well as for asserting a sensibility anathema to grown-ups.
Most adults never paid much mind until the comics-and the kids reading them-began to change.
During the early postwar years, comic books shifted in tone and content. Fed by the same streams as pulp fiction and film noir, many of the titles most prominent in the late forties and early fifties told lurid stories of crime, vice, lust, and horror, rather than noble tales of costumed heroes and heroines such as Superman, Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman, whose exploits had initially established the comics genre in the late thirties and early forties. These unprecedented dark comics sprouted from cracks in the back corners of the cultural terrain and grew wild. Unlike the movies and the broadcast media, comic books had no effective monitoring or regulatory mechanism-no powerful self-censoring body like the film industry's Hays Office, no government authority like the FCC imposing content standards. Uninhibited, shameless, frequently garish and crude, often shocking, and sometimes excessive, these crime, horror, and romance comics provided young people of the early postwar years with a means of defying and escaping the mainstream culture of the time, while providing the guardians of that culture an enormous, taunting, close-range target. The world of comics became a battleground in a war between two generations, delineating two eras in American pop-culture history.
"Comic books are definitely harmful to impressionable people, and most young people are impressionable," said the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, author of an incendiary tract, Seduction of the Innocent, which indicted comics as a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. "I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.
"The time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy stores."
Churches and community groups raged and organized campaigns against comic books. Young people acted out mock trials of comics characters. Schools held public burnings of comics, and students threw thousands of the books into the bonfires; at more than one conflagration, children marched around the flames reciting incantations denouncing comics. Headlines in newspapers and magazines around the country warned readers: "Depravity for Children-Ten Cents a Copy!" "Horror in the Nursery," "The Curse of the Comic Books." The offices of one of the most adventurous and scandalous publishers, EC Comics, were raided by the New York City police. More than a hundred acts of legislation were introduced on the state and municipal levels to ban or limit the sale of comics: Scores of titles were outlawed in New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and other states, and ordinances to regulate comics were passed in dozens of cities. Soon, Congress took action with a set of sensational, televised hearings that nearly destroyed the comic-book business. Like Janice Valleau, the majority of working comics artists, writers, and editors-more than eight hundred people-lost their jobs. A great many of them would never be published again.
Through the near death of comic books and the end of many of their makers' creative lives, postwar popular culture was born.
Page-one news as it occurred, the story of the comics controversy is a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the culture wars and one that defies now-common notions about the evolution of twentieth-century popular culture, including the conception of the postwar sensibility-a raucous and cynical one, inured to violence and absorbed with sex, skeptical of authority, and frozen in young adulthood-as something spawned by rock and roll. The truth is more complex. Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry added the soundtrack to a scene created in comic books.
It is clear now that the hysteria over comic books was always about many things other than cartoons: about class and money and taste; about traditions and religions and biases rooted in time and place; about presidential politics; about the influence of a new medium called television; and about how art forms, as well as people, grow up. The comic-book war was one of the first and hardest-fought conflicts between young people and their parents in America, and it seems clear, too, now, that it was worth the fight.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ten-cent Plague by David Hajdu Copyright © 2008 by David Hajdu. Excerpted by permission.
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