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Summary: Shocking True Suspense Tales of Weird Crime Horror Mystery
Comment: Comic books have gone through waves of popularity and condemnation, but the great scare of the early 1950s takes the cake. Here David Hajdu offers an enlightening cultural history of that bizarre witch hunt, which was not necessarily directed at the superhero stories that later dominated the medium, but the then-huge crazes of true crime and horror comics, the insanity and gruesomeness of which are still loved by nonconformists to this day. Hajdu starts with a selective history of comic books then proceeds to the cultural obsessions of the early 1950s, which created near-hysteria against anything that wasn't unabashedly conformist and squeaky clean. In a close parallel to the contemporaneous McCarthyism, critics and do-gooders were convinced that comic books created the menace of juvenile delinquency, with politicians and civic groups disregarding the lack of clear evidence in favor of holier-than-thou values and purity.
Hajdu does a great job deconstructing the great comic book scare into its component parts - a fear of nonconformity, cultural snobbery, political self-aggrandizement, shallow jingoism, and a refusal to accept the thinking power of kids. Knowledgeable observers will recognize that the rhetoric of the great comic book scare has repeated itself in subsequent cultural witch hunts like those against rock, rap, the Internet, and video games. Hajdu is an excellent cultural historian, and while he sometimes lapses into turgid professor-ese like "nor did they use Hooligan's clashes with the law for pedagogy," he really brings out the cultural and political causes and effects of a scare that was really about much more than comic books. Censorship Does Not Pay. [~doomsdayer520~]
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Summary: I may be too dumb for this book
Comment: I bought this book due to an appreciation for the issue of censorship and because I enjoyed the EC books, which have been reprinted recently in hardcover. However, I found this book to read almost like an encyclopedia. It's definitely well-researched but written in a tedious, drone-like style. Rarely have I read a book where I couldn't figure out the definition of a word I didn't know within the context of the sentence, but that happened numerous times here. People come and go, names are brought up and never mentioned again, other works are cited, but all in all the book couldn't keep my interest. Most disappointingly, I didn't feel the book really showed how the comic-book scare "changed the world," it just said it did. Perhaps I'm not the target audience for this style of writing, so look at this review as a friendly 'heads-up'- if you're looking for a lighter read, skip this book. Otherwise, enjoy.
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Summary: The Censors Win One
Comment: In hindsight, censorship so often seems ridiculous. It seems silly now that anyone was trying to keep readers from reading _Tom Jones_ a couple of centuries ago, or that seventy years ago, movies could not show married people sharing a double bed. A less familiar arena for censorship was comic books of sixty years ago, an effort that was not only silly but was successful. Before it, a kid could spend a dime to buy a horror or crime comic, which gives the title to _The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) by David Hajdu. The problem, according to the censors, is that kids were putting their dimes down for comics that were sexy and violent and which punctured the complacent conformity of the fifties. Hajdu, a professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, has given a lively history of comic censorship (this is not an academic treatise) and the toll it took on liberty but also on the thousand-or-so artists, writers, letterers, and others who were putting out hundreds of comics a month. Hajdu says that with each comic traded and passed along, the comics reached more people than movies or television at the time, so when the censors succeeded, it was a real shift in culture, one worthy of documentation in this comprehensive and readable book.
Protests about comics started when they were first invented at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in the forties critics criticized the "mayhem, murder, torture, and abduction" handled by "superman heroics". This is one of the surprises in Hajdu's work: many of the censors were so eager to include all comics as insidious that they saw fault in the superheroes that we all know were fighting for "Truth, Justice, and the American Way." Psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham accused Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman of, respectively, fascism, homoeroticism, and sadomasochism. The main concern of Hajdu's book is the horror comics that had a brief lifespan, starting when Bill Gaines of EC Comics introduced them in 1950. The tales were not just bloody, they were weird, and were poorly understood by adults, who could only fathom that conventions were being challenged by the reading styles of youths who were at constant threat of becoming "juvenile delinquents" thereby. Dr Wertham, as an expert acknowledged by everyone who hated comics, was invited to testify before a 1954 Congressional hearing. Senator Estes Kefauver organized the hearing, as he had done for the more famous hearings on organized crime a couple of years before. A highlight of the book is Gaines's appearance before the committee. He was eager to testify, but was exhausted from a Dexedrine bender and did his cause little good. Kefauver faced him with the cover of a comic that showed a man gripping a blood-spattered ax in one hand and a severed head in the another, standing over the headless body of a woman. Gaines said he used his own good taste as a measure of what was permissible, and Kefauver fired up about the picture, demanding, "Do you think that is in good taste?" Gaines stammered, "Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic," and proceeded to explain that it would be bad taste if the man were shown lifting the head higher to show more gore. He essentially sealed the case against horror comics.
Hollywood had adopted a code that cleaned all the filth out of movies, and similarly the comics developed a code and a seal of approval. The code was one thing that killed the comics; the other was that Wertham and the Congressional hearing had made the occupation of working on comics unsavory in the eyes of the public. Artists who had taken pride in their work no longer liked admitting what they did. Like other publishers, Gaines capitulated, throwing hundreds of artists into other fields. They became postmen or security guards; one who went into advertising said he made a fine living, "But the work was work. It wasn't comics. You couldn't be as creative. It wasn't fun. You don't have the freedom... I missed comic books for the rest of my life." It isn't surprising that with the rebellion of the sixties that comics (or comix) were part of the trip. Gaines himself had a revenge of sorts. He took the satirical part of his comics and turned them into a magazine; if they were in a magazine, they didn't have to conform to any comics code. The magazine was _Mad_, and it was far more influential in making kids laugh and distrust authority than the horror comics had been in making them ax murderers. Nonetheless, the comics scare succeeded where the Commie scare had not; at the same time as the Congressional hearing on comics, Senator Joseph McCarthy was beginning his downfall. Hajdu's book is funny and revealing, and has excellent small biographies of the main players in the comics and anti-comics game. The anti-comics forces won this one for the censors, and put a temporary end to one particular branch of an art form that has come back in today's graphic novels. Those crying for censorship this time are having little effect.
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Summary: The other 50s witch-hunt
Comment: While most people are well aware of McCarthyism, the tale of the persecution of comic-book writers by moral do-gooders and other pests remains unknown except to those who either lived through it, or younger comic-book fans that know their history. Hopefully, Hajdu's compelling new book will change all of that.
The book covers comic-books from the post World War 2 era to the late 50s, and describes the rise, reign and tragic fall (and neutering, under the 'Comics Code') of comic books as an industry, until their later revivals.
It was quite saddening to read of the numerous people who put their hearts and souls into their work, and how they were essentially forced out of their jobs and treated as social pariahs. The modern day attacks upon video-games mirror the attacks on comics in the 50s.
Hadju depicts comics as being the unsung hero in rebellion from established, conservative norms. While rock n' roll is often blamed for this triumph, he shows a very clear generational divide between parents and young adults over comic books as well, and the same arguments of 'morality,' taste and juvenile delinquency were applied to both. While Elvis shook his hips, kids were reading illustrated stories that frightened, excited and entertained them.
The ultimate question that The Ten-Cent Plague leaves us with is this: who is more fit to judge a child's reading diet - parents or busybodies?
One hopes that Kefauverism will join our lexicon just as McCarthyism has. He fought hard for that honor, and fully deserves it.
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Summary: An overlooked chapter in pop-culture history
Comment: When I think about all the uproar over the last few years over video game violence, about how they teach kids to kill and desensitive them, when I think of all the Jack Thompsons of the world suing game publishers for what they purport to do, I am still glad to know that it could be worse - far, far worse. Jack Thompson may be out there, but he never for one day held as much sway over parents and lawmakers as Fredric Wertham and Estes Kefauver held over America in 1955. While Joe McCarthy was busy hunting Commies, these two were going after the comics industry, at first just horror and crime comics, but pretty soon all comics, to them, were "crime" comics.
I've read a lot of comics history (Men Of Tomorrow being a great example), but this, to my knowledge, is the first book to look squarely on those few years post-WW II, pre-television when the Great Enemy was comics. Mind you, this was a time when super-heroes as a comic were a fading trend. The war made for some good hero stories, but the kids were looking for something new now, as were all those G.I.'s who read comics overseas. All of the familiar stories are here - M.C. Gaines' strange death, his son Bill helping to make E.C. Comics known for horror, the rise of romance, the launch of Mad, and of course the sub-committe hearings on the juvenile delinquincy,eventually to be associated with Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver.. Thankfully, Hadju , while giving more detail of that moment than most books, didn't just re-iterate every little nuance of the hearings. He did, however, bring a new dimension (and for me, a new hate) to Fredric Wertham, the pyschologist who wrote Seduction Of The Innocent, a book linking comic books to juvenile delinquency. He weaves a pretty good narrative of just how this man became so powerful in his opinions, and how he had the ear of almost every parent and city organization in the country.
The reason I say things could be far worse now with video games is that these guys actually had everyone so worked up, almost all the states were passing legislation banning the sales of most comics to almost anyone. A lot of times, they wouldn't even make it on the shelves! I also enjoyed seeing the exact origins of the Comics Code Authority, whose stamp on comics I was used to seeing most of my life (it's quietly been shuffled off now - DC Comics never uses it anymore, and Marvel has their own in-house ratings system). Yet read how the Authority worked, and what they looked for, and try to imagine that companies were still submitting their stories to these guys for approval as recently as five to ten years ago...that's how far-reaching the effects were.
The biggest revelation reading this book has to be the first part of the appendix: over fifteen pages, Hajdu lists more than 850 individuals - artists, writers, and others - who never again worked in the business after the crackdown on comics. I can't even begin to fathom that. That would basically be like the entire industry today just disappearing! It was also shocking, to me, to see just how many children went along with all these public book burnings (and so soon after WW II!). Many didn't even realize why they were doing it, but they felt they were doing something good because the PTA said so. As a co-worker of mine would say, there's a lot to anger up the blood in here.
"Naturally, with comic magazine censorship now a fact, we at EC look forward to an immediate drop in the crime and juvenile delinquency rate of the United States. We trust there will be fewer robberies, fewer murders, and fewer rapes!'
-Bill Gaines, Editor of EC Comics, in the final issues of all of EC's "New Trend" line of horror and crime comics. That's the kind of bitter sarcasm I expect from the guys who created Mad Magazine
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