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The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
March 2008
On Sale: April 24, 2008
448 pages
ISBN: 0374187673
EAN: 9780374187675
Hardcover
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Fantasy
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 pulpy, boldly illustrated
pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture
emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community
bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress—only to resurface
with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine. The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has
never been fully told—until The Ten-Cent Plague. David
Hajdu’s remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world
of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion
of authority. When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock
and roll. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how—years before music—
comics brought on a clash between children and their
parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by
outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often
shocking, comics spoke to young people and provided the
guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents,
teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public
bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress
took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed
the careers of hundreds of artists and writers. The Ten-Cent Plague radically revises common notions of
popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide
between “high” and “low” art. As he did with the lives of
Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington (in Lush Life) and Bob
Dylan and his circle (in Positively 4th Street), Hajdu
brings a place, a time, and a milieu unforgettably back to
life.
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