Highly informative, slightly esoteric, and entirely relevant, Hajdu's case study on the hysteria surrounding crime comic-books at the dawn of the Cold War left me with far more questions than answers. While this generally is a sign that an author has breached the innermost walls of my cerebrum and forced me to question my previous held assumptions regarding a given topic, Hajdu's impeccable research and wealth of knowledge was simply too much to handle. When I first purchased the book, I was under the assumption that I would be getting a comprehensive look at the hysteria surrounding the comic-book industry as a whole. Not so. Hajdu's research is extraordinarily focused (essentially the decade following WWII), yet highly effective. Those looking for a bit of easy reading need not apply. But I digress...
As a twenty-three-year-old, it makes perfect sense that I would find Hajdu's book rather esoteric. Simply put, I never experienced any of the comic-book burnings or public hysteria cited by Hajdu. But, that does not leave me ignorant of the reactionary elements central to the hysteria surrounding potentially "damaging" aspects of youth culture. As I read this book, I couldn't help but be reminded of the "parental advisory" stickers gracing my generation's compact discs, or the on-going debate surrounding the influence of violent video games on the minds of our nation's "impressionable" youth. Let's not forget the censorship imposed by retail outlets like Target or Wal-Mart, who have effectively banned CD's containing "objectionable" lyrical content from their shelves. So what's the bottom line? I think there's fertile ground for a sequel...

I found this book totally fascinating. Not only does it discuss the social history surrounding comics in the 40's and 50's but you can also see some parallels between the traditional culture's reaction to comics back then and the reaction of some to video games today. (There as some big differences though that will prevent the anti-gaming types (Jack Thompson, etc.) today from doing the damage Werthiemer (sp?) and his crew did back then.) I think anyone interested in social history, comics or video games will enjoy this book.

It's no surprise to readers of David Hajdu's previous works that he knows how to research and how to translate that research into insightful, well-woven prose. He has a knack for finding unforgettable characters and telling their story in a compelling narrative. The book is laced with information gained from numerous in-depth interviews.

The story of the comics is itself incredible. The author clearly has a bone-deep knowledge and love of comics that can be seen in the biographies of the various creators and in the controversies they engendered.

But what most attracts me is that Hajdu provides a new reading for the social history of the 1950s, a new, intriguing way to understand contemporary culture. What a fascinating book for comic book fans. I just hope people seriously interested in contemporary American culture and history will read the book as well.

Hajdu does a good job of writing about the hysteria directed against sequential art (to use Will Eisner's term) in the 1940s and 50s. He does a good job of portraying just how destructive the forces of censorship can be when certain cultural factors come into play. Things may be much better today, but after reading this book, I can't help but think that another big campaign of censorship against comics and other media is right around the corner.

If this book has a weakness, I think that it's that Hajdu doesn't say much in this book about the present state of the medium of comics or ways that fallout from the 1950s crackdown on comics has continued to affect public perception of the medium. Still, I think that this is a must-read for all comics fans. One especially sobering part of the book is a long list of writers and artists who never worked in comics again after the 1950s crackdown. It's very sad to think that the silencing of these writers and artists may have deprived the world of some brilliant work and that some of these people may have reached the same status as Will Eisner or Jack Kirby if they had been able to continue working in comics. Just thinking about it makes me want to write a big check to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

this book is far from perfect. and i understand where many of the more negative reviews are coming from. the mass condemnation of the comics and how it ruined the medium in the fifties is common knowledge to most comic fans. this book was written with people who dont know about wertham/seduction of the innocent/bill gaines getting grilled on tv by the senate/the comics code in mind. the author assumes his readers arent aware of these things and writes for any reader. however the main market for this book are comics fans and historians and many of them will feel let down or insulted by having these things explained to them as if they have no prior knowledge of them. however this book provides alot of great lessons and allegory about censorship and the author really did his homework. this is one of the first comic book history books i have read that has interviewed the book burners, banners, and many of the writers and artists who left the medium because of the backlash. and the book reads as a great modern social commentary when you consider it in terms of todays backlash against video games.

The inside cover reads "this is the revelatory, until now largely untold story of a lost world of the imagination..." Not quite so true - there was very little in this volume that I hadn't read or seen elsewhere, scattered across the forwards of the recent EC hardback collections, Stan Lee's autobiography, a recent cable documentary about the history of comics, and a dozen other sources. But this book does bring it all together into a clear and fairly comprehensive narrative of those dark days and I recommend it, not just for comic fans but also for those that are just interested in American history and or sociology.

It was an interesting trifecta last week, as I finished this book, watched the season finale of Boston Legal, and began reading Kenneth Johnson's sequel to the 1980s sci-fi miniseries, "V". All three gelled into the message that we usually don't learn from our history and thus do repeat our mistakes. They also gelled into the idea that all it takes for a group to get its way is for it to create a sentiment of fear against something, and then to allow for peer pressure to step in and move the society into a direction no-one would have imagined shortly before. There is little more dangerous than a scared populace.

Mr. Hajdu interviewed some of the, now elderly, children that participated in the bonfires that burned comic books. Just a few years after people reacted in horror to films of the Hitler youth burning books, in Germany, American youth were doing the same thing. The "kids" talked about how they felt they were doing something positive, but in retrospect realized they had been misled and tricked by adults - parents and teachers.

The architects of this censorship created an environment of fear: Store owners feared prosecution and attacks, teenage customers feared being beat up by mobs of do-gooders, parents feared that their children would become monsters, politicians feared they would lose their positions. This great comic book scare was coincident to the much bigger scare of the McCarthy hearings. In both cases a combination of the self-serving and the well-meaning and fear ruined the livelihoods of people. Mr. Hajdu, in an appendix, lists 14 pages (double columned) of writers and artists that never again worked in the industry the loved, after the purge of the 1950s.

Mr. Hajdu takes the time to carefully introduce all of the players, and in so doing, gives a good overall history of comic books in America, from their origins as newspaper strips. In doing this he helps the reader understand how the works were viewed by the average person when the scare began. He also talks about how they changed due to societal changes and due to the crisis.

It's a good book - and thought provoking. Hopefully it will be eye-opening to its readers to be wary of those that deal in fear. Hopefully it will also help its readers to realize that comic books are a medium, not a genre - a medium that can have diverse products aimed at every age group. In recent years district attorneys in Texas and Georgia have tried to prosecute comic book sellers for selling adult comics to adults on the grounds that comic books are for kids. A reminder that 2008 is not that far removed from 1954.

This book was recommended along with Amy Kiste Nyberg's "Seal of Approval". This one is more of a history and biography of the people, Nyberg's is more of an academic study. I'd 4-star this if it had presented itself as a history and a biography, but since it purports to be a review of the issues as well as the people I 3-star it - if you promise something you have to deliver it.

The book is about the people who worked in the comic book industry and the development of that industry up to the institution of the Comics Code, a self-regulatory system enacted to avoid government regulation of the comics industry. That's not actually what the book says it's about - it says it's about the industry as a whole and the impact of the Code - but I guess you can't judge a book by its cover.

I kill me...

Seriously, this is an interesting bit of history and stands on its own there. It recounts the business, and the political and cultural environment in the 1950s that all but killed the business. But it's those words "all but" that make the big difference between what this book purported to be and what it is. The fact is, comic books survived. They were published through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. They started coming back into their own in the 1980s, and by the 1990s the graphic novel craze had brought them right back. How did this happen? You won't find out in this book. Considering its subtitle is "The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America" I would have expected to see it deal with events both before and after. It doesn't.

Net-net: if you're looking for a historical document to describe a period of time and the people who were active in it, this book does that very well. The author is a journalist and uses those skills. Those aren't really the kinds of books I usually buy or read for pleasure, but your mileage may vary. I would have liked to have known the answers to questions like:

- Did companies that were subject to the Comics Code sell more issues than companies that weren't?
- Did parents actually consider whether a particular book was subject to the Comics Code when allowing their children to purchase?
- Did members of the Code try to push its limits or self-censor to make sure they stayed well inside its scope?

Without them, it was instructive for me and not a waste of time from a work perspective. With them, I would have made all my colleagues buy it. But this would have taken an author like Niall Ferguson, and this author isn't Niall Ferguson.

Probably one of the greatest evils in society are the self-righteous moralists who want to rid the world of what they perceive as sinful, usually saying it's "for the children". Usually, the things they want to actually get rid of are merely items that encourage free thought or seemingly contradict their own narrow dogma. Thus today, we get those who want to ban Harry Potter books not because of any proven harm, but merely the fact that they don't fall into their own interpretation of good and evil. It's not enough to choose to ignore the items, but also to deprive others of their joy.

David Hajdu's The Ten Cent Plague details one such situation that occurred in the early 1950s and focused on comic books. This was an era when comics were at a creative and commercial peak, dealing with not only the superhero genre, but also horror, crime, war and romance. While some of it was over-the-top, it also provided entertainment and occasionally delivered a message as well.

The main villain in this piece is Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent, a book that alleged links between comic books and juvenile delinquency, links that were often weak at best, and completely fabricated in other cases. In this Legion of Doom, however, Wertham is merely the biggest name, but there are others as well, driven to hound the comic book industry out of existence. They would use book-burnings, boycotts and the police to get their way, and to a large extent, they would win. Due to their efforts, the Comics Code was instituted, resulting in comics that went from being fun (if edgy) to watered-down pap fit for only the youngest kids. It was like replacing Bugs Bunny and Homer Simpson with Baby Huey and the Care Bears.

It would take decades for the comic books to get back much of the creativity they lost, and commercially, they would never be as dominant again. Yet there were still heroes in this era - most notably Bill Gaines - but they could never quite grasp the significance of Wertham and company until it was too late. Around the only positive that came out of this period was Mad Magazine, which Gaines was able to squeeze past the Comics Code by changing its classification from comic book to magazine.

Hajdu's writing is always engaging. I would have liked a few more illustrations but that's a minor quibble. Overall, this is a good book of relatively modern history, not only giving a good look at another era, but also providing a valuable lesson that too many times, the ones who say they are protecting "the children" from evil may be doing the actual evil themselves.

This is a case study of how groupthink fueled by paranoia, political ambition, and lazy media outlets remiss in their responsibility to check the politicians can kill creativity.

The long list of comics industry folks who lost their jobs is appalling.

As a sometime writer of extreme horror fiction (DEADWEIGHT) and/or off-the-wall depictions of childhood icons (SANTA STEPS OUT), I can feel the chill even from 1954.

An eyeopener and a must-read!

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~]

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.

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.

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.

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

I definitely enjoyed reading the book. While the "broad strokes" of the history it recounts are ones I mostly knew already, like Bill Gaines crashing on diet pills while testifying before Congress, the book is full of details from the various people who worked in the comics industry up through the Fifties, so the personal insights still made for interesting reading. Will Eisner, who, in my opinion, is second only to Jack Kirby as an artistic innovator for the medium, seems to have been a major source for Hajdu, so his comments were particularly welcome to me.

The book's subtitle of "The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America" seemed a little misleading to me, in that there's not much on how it changed America. There's a lot about how it changed the comics industry, of course (most notable, pretty much destroying EC Comics but for a little magazine called "Mad"), but I didn't see much about it changing America. Sure, I didn't expect "if there hadn't been a comic book scare, we wouldn't have gone to Vietnam!" or some such, but it would have been interesting to see, for instance, Hajdu speculating on how the comic book scare influenced the early television industry. It would have also been interesting to at least go a little into the Silver Age of Comics, and how the scare influenced the creators of that era, but the book pretty much ends with the establishment of the Comics Code.

Highly recommended for anyone who loves comic books, especially older ones, and hates censorship.

This is a great and entertaining work of pop culture journalism and sociology. I started reading this book out of a love for the history of comic books, and soon found that it was more a rigorous journalistic exploration of the Kefauver/Wortham hearings in 1954 in NYC that resulted in the creation of the Comics Code Authority. A whole book?? But as I read this well written account I was drawn into a story of censorship that gradually built to a crescendo of unease as Hajdu portrayed the political and personal agendas that resulted in the virtual demise of the comic book industry. The clinical depiction of a movement that resulted in mass comic book burnings by high school students and girl scout troops is creepy and hair raising, almost akin to reading about a country behind the Iron Curtain. But this was Eisenhower America !! Hajdu interviews some of these people as adults and you can hear how disturbed they were even at the time but felt swept along in the conformity movement by their parents and teachers.
From a comics history standpoint this book really highlights how devastating the climate was to the comicbook industry and explains why so many of the exotic companies and "brands "went out of business because of the enormous ill will and bad publicity that lingered even after the comics code was initiated. A huge number of creators left the industry never to return and the ones that stayed were afraid to reveal to anyone what they did as being in the comics industry was viewed as close to an admission of child molestation. The Hearings had an effect for many more years than I ever imagined. It is almost hard to believe that the industry survived and eventually grew to its current prominent influence in pop culture. The last chapter of this book is chilling to read in its depiction of the state of the industry after the years long witch hunts that were essentially victorious.
Comic books were not blameless in this story as many of the EC examples of horror and weird tales readily show. But the political and moral reaction of the 1950s to me was much more disturbing than the dilemma that it was addressing (juvenile delinquency ) thru attacking a simple and probably insignificant contributor ( comics ) to a much more complicated situation. The totalitarian tactics leveraged against comics by well meaning but simpleminded people including politicos and ministers and educators mirror the McCarthy Communist witch hunts of the times. This is a cautionary tale that deserved the spotlight given to it by David Hajdu's wonderful and disturbing book. A great and compelling read !

Very readable, well written book. Anybody who read and enjoyed "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay" should pick this up. My only criticism would be that the epilogue seemed a little short and forced.

I found David Hajdu's book singularly diverting, entertaining, and informative. Most of all, and I can't quite define how or why, I found "The Ten-Cent Plague" to be downright cozy. Perhaps because I think of that era that way; nostalgia, I suppose.

I applaud Mr. Hajdu's unquestionable ability to vividly introduce the reader to (or remind him of; depending on one's age) an extraordinarily different era; a better time than this, in my humble opinion. He's a wonderful researcher and writer. But....

First, an intelligent and reasonable argument can be made that certain comic books were bizarre and lurid, and that their influence upon the young and impressionable wasn't exactly wholesome or salubrious. Mr. Hajdu's sneering dismissal of this viewpoint hardly indicates sophistication (as much as he may want to think that it does). Mind you, I'm not necessarily making this argument. I was an avid comic-book reader myself, and look how I turned out! My point is that such an argument isn't groundless, nor is it inherently evil. After all, contrary to what many people believe, there is nothing even remotely anti-American about a given community insisting on certain values and standards of conduct, and in employing censorship as a means. Until the egregious 1970s, the only form of censorship the courts would condemn and prohibit was government censorship; each community had the right and duty to establish and enforce its own standards.

Second, despite Mr, Hajdu's best efforts, he doesn't persuade (he certainly didn't persuade me) that the great comic-book scare was particularly scary. And this "scare" changed America? Oh, please.

Mr. Hajdu is more successful as an observer than as a commentator. And it is the hyperbole and silliness of some of his comments and historical claims that cost him a star. Still, four stars is nothing to sneeze at and I do indeed recommend this book.

Here's something truly "Weird," "Scary" and "Amazing!" It's a history with a gripping-but-true story of American hysteria that most Americans probably have forgotten - or perhaps never knew -- until Columbia University journalism professor David Hajdu thoroughly researched America's crazy crusade against comics.

In the growing literature about Americans' love affair with comic books, Hajdu has staked a major cultural landmark with his new, "The 10-Cent Plague." As a journalist myself for more than 30 years, I've closely watched the ebb and flow of American comics and graphic novels. I can tell you this: Hajdu's cultural history is so fresh and so solid that, henceforth, anyone interested in understanding the strange twists and turns of our post-World War II culture will have to include his history of comic hysteria on any "must-read" list.

If you haven't heard Hajdu on NPR or read any of the growing number of magazine and newspaper articles about his book, the use of the term "hysteria" may sound - well, "Insane." But the tragic truth is that, starting in the late 1940s only three years after the defeat of the Nazis in Europe, Americans in towns across our nation felt it was their sacred duty to build comic book-burning bonfires, encouraging and sometimes compelling students to stand up for virtue at these conflagrations. Hajdu points out that this showed a terrifying blindness to world history - eerily reminiscent of the zealous book burnings in Germany in the 1930s.

A few wise American observers in that era recognized this historical irony - but, as shocking as this sounds, Hajdu documents that the mainstream of American media amounted to a frenzied mob in some Grade-B horror film. Almost no one was willing to defend comic books - and, as strange as this may seem, such current pillars of free speech as The New York Times, the New Yorker and the Hartford Courant actually poured fuel on the comic book pyres. If you doubt this, check out Hajdu's detailed reporting. He cites enough examples to make all of us in American media hang our heads these days to think of how wrong our venerable institutions could be.

This was, indeed, a very strange outbreak of paranoia and bigotry, which Hajdu deconstructs with fascinating anecdotes along the way. It was partly a flowering of fear about emerging youth culture that began as far back as the war years. It was partly a fear of the "sort of people" involved in producing comic books, who were considered socially unsavory - an ugly bias vaguely aimed at "lower-class" and immigrant Americans.

Along the way, much damage was done. New laws were passed to stamp out comics. Police action was taken against comic books and comic writers, artists, editors and publishers. Congressional hearings were held. Things got so ugly that Hajda devotes 14 pages in his appendix to listing the names of hundreds of men and women in comic book publishing houses "who never again worked in comics after the purge of the 1950s."

Why should we care? Well, first, this truly is a "good read." Hajdu obviously has been influenced by his love of comics and pulp fiction in general. He writes this history in a suspenseful narrative style that vividly paints key scenes for us, such as the first mass burning of comics in 1948.

Second, and more importantly, this is a cautionary tale against censorship, which cost the religious community far more than it gained by righteously crusading against pulp. During World War II, for example, Hajdu documents that Catholic leaders had discovered that comics served as important educational media for millions of young Catholics, especially those challenged by the English language. Thousands of parishes across the U.S. began using Bible-story comics for evangelism. Unfortunately, within a few years, a handful of overly zealous Catholic leaders jumped into the vanguard of a take-no-prisoners campaign to destroy comic producers.

It's only now - half a century after the purge - that comics are rebounding in a big way and, finally, there's growing interest in spiritual circles in drawing young readers into timeless truths with the powerful words and images of comic artistry.

The cover of Hajdu's book shows a teen-age boy sitting up late in bed, flipping the pages of a creepy comic book. It's a great cover design! I bet you'll find yourself sitting up late to finish "just one more chapter" of Hajdu's wild history of that explosive era.

With THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE, David Hajdu does for comic books what his previous books did so brilliantly for music. Hajdu's research is exhaustive without being exhausting to read; THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE has the readability and vivid characters of a great novel as Hajdu tells his entertaining, thought-provoking account of the censorship debate over comic books in the 1950s, and how it trickled down into other aspects of pop culture and generation-gap clashes between youths and their parents. Instead of simply rehashing what comic fans already know, Hajdu digs deep into other areas, talking in-depth to the first-hand witnesses to these events, like the early comic creators who lost their jobs once people like Fredric Wertham and Estes Kefauver denounced comics as a corruptor of America's children -- you know, before heavy metal and video games and Fill In Your Favorite Bad Influence Here came along. :-) Hajdu brings the era and its struggles to life in a page-turner brimming with insight and affection. THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE is a must-read not only for fans of comics and pop culture, but for anyone intrigued with how censorship and power struggles shape society.

So thundered psychiatrist Frank Wertham in his 1954 Seduction of the Innocent, a book which accused comic books of breeding juvenile delinquincy (quoted on p. 6 of Hajdu's book). Today, Wertham's comparison between Hitler and comic books seems ludicrous. But at the time, millions of Americans took it seriously, and it brought down the comic book industry.

David Hajdu's wonderful The Ten-Cent Plague is a history of the culture war over comics that spanned the decade after the second world war. By the mid-40s, he claims, comic books were beyond doubt the leading form of popular entertainment, selling an astounding 80 to 100 million copies each week. Some 650 titles were released each month, and the industry employed around 1,000 writers, artists, and editors. The leading comic book publisher was EC, headed by the genius William Gaines.

The genre in those days, lead by EC, focused primarily on horror and crime, and some of the covers, interior artwork, and story lines could get gruesome: pools of blood, severed heads, stony-faced and scary killers. The artwork and storylines could get sexy too: heroines in filmy negligees, the occasional cleavage or bare foot showing. Middle class parents, egged on by a few religious leaders and political conservatives, began to express concerns, and those concerns grew into a national crusade against the "corrupting" influence of comic books. Editorials raged against them, politicians speechified against them, the Senate held hearings, and schools and churches sponsored comic book bonfires.

In an effort to salvage what it could, the comic book industry organized the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954, and promised to watchdog its product by promoting "wholesomeness and virtue" (p. 319). But the resulting CMAA Code, written to placate the blue-noses, destroyed the comic book. Cops and other authorities were never to be depicted with "disrespect." No comic book could use the words "horror" or "terror" in its title. All "lurid, unsavory, or gruesome illustrations" were forbidden. Ditto on the depiction of the "walking dead, vampires, ghouls, werewolfs, and cannibals." Ditto on "words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings" (pp. 291-292).

You get the drift. The enforcement of this Code transformed comic books into "funny books." Interesting art and storylines disappeared in the wake of the Code, to be replaced with comics about anthropomorphized animals. But the kids (and adults) who'd avidly read the old comic genre wanted little to do with its antiseptic replacement. By the mid-1950s, title release per month had dropped to one-third its mid-1940s level, and 8 out of 10 comic writers, artists, and editors were out of work. Most of the titles released by EC disappeared overnight.

William Gaines rebelled against the death of the comic by publishing MAD, which in a roundabout way (sketched by Hajdu in his final chapter) inspired the underground revival of the comic book in the late 1960s. But before that resurgence, one of the most brutal massacres of any culture war fought in America gutted an entire genre of popular art, and in the process intimidated and de facto blacklisted hundreds of talented artists.

Hajdu's book is a fascinating, frightening read. My guess is that few of us--even those of us who, like me, were kids during the comic book purging era--are familiar with the witch hunt that Hadju chronicles. It's well worth knowing about, particularly in an era when a new front of the current culture wars seems to open almost every week.

So thundered psychiatrist Frank Wertham in his 1954 Seduction of the Innocent, a book which accused comic books of breeding juvenile delinquincy (quoted on p. 6 of Hajdu's book). Today, Wertham's comparison between Hitler and comic books seems ludicrous. But at the time, millions of Americans took it seriously, and it brought down the comic book industry.

David Hajdu's wonderful The Ten-Cent Plague is a history of the culture war over comics that spanned the decade after the second world war. By the mid-40s, he claims, comic books were beyond doubt the leading form of popular entertainment, selling an astounding 80 to 100 million copies each week. Some 650 titles were released each month, and the industry employed around 1,000 writers, artists, and editors. The leading comic book publisher was EC, headed by the genius William Gaines.

The genre in those days, lead by EC, focused primarily on horror and crime, and some of the covers, interior artwork, and story lines could get gruesome: pools of blood, severed heads, stony-faced and scary killers. The artwork and storylines could get sexy too: heroines in filmy negligees, the occasional cleavage or bare foot showing. Middle class parents, egged on by a few religious leaders and political conservatives, began to express concerns, and those concerns grew into a national crusade against the "corrupting" influence of comic books. Editorials raged against them, politicians speechified against them, and schools and churches sponsored comic book bonfires.

In an effort to salvage what it could, the comic book industry organized the Comics Magazine Association of America in 1954, and promised to watchdog its product by promoting "wholesomness and virtue" (p. 319). But the resulting CMAA Code, written to placate the blue-noses, destroyed the comic book. Cops and other authorities were never to be depicted with "disrespect." No comic book could use the words "horror" or "terror" in its title. All "lurid, unsavory, or gruesome illustrations" were forbidden. Ditto on the depiction of the "walking dead, vampires, ghouls, werewolfs, and cannibals." Ditto on "words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings" (pp. 291-292).

You get the drift. The enforcement of this Code transformed comic books to "funny books." Interesting art and storylines disappeared in the wake of the Code, to be replaced with comics about anthropomorphized animals. But the kids (and adults) who'd avidly read the old comic genre wanted little to do with its antiseptic replacement. By the mid-1950s, title release per month had dropped to one-third its mid-1940s level, and 8 out of 10 comic writers, artists, and editors were out of work. Most of the titles released by EC disappeared overnight.

William Gaines rebelled against the death of the comic by publishing MAD, which in a roundabout way (sketched by Hajdu in his final chapter) inspired the underground revival of the comic book in the late 1960s. But before that resurgence, one of the most brutal massacres of any culture war fought in America gutted an entire genre of popular art, and in the process intimidated and de facto blacklisted hundreds of talented artists.

Hajdu's book is a fascinating, frightening read. My guess is that few of us--even those of us who, like me, were kids during the comic book purging era--are familiar with the witch hunt that Hadju chronicles. It's well worth knowing about, particularly in an era when a new front of the current culture wars seems to open almost every week.

This book is an interesting overview of the "beginning of the end" of the great1950s' crime and monster comic craze that featured horrific comic book titles like Dick Briefer's The Monster of Frankenstein and The EC Archives: Crime Suspenstories Volume 1 (The Ec Archives), both of which quickly gets cancelled due to the creation of the self-imposed Comic Code Authority. The fuss starts when Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent (a scathing assault on the comic book industry due to its use of sex, violence and deviate behavior - all of which was aimed at children) is published and garnishes enough controversy to warrant a Senate committee hearing. The result: decades of censorship and wimpy white-bread superheroes cast as role models for the youth of America. THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE is a must read for any golden age comic fan.