The Ten-Cent Plague

By David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, £17.99/$26 (hardcover)

Reviewed by Alasdair Hopwood

Hoards of feral, feckless youths roam the streets in packs, harassing ordinary, law-abiding folk, attacking each other and the innocent. What are we to do? Who/what is to blame? Sound familiar? Well, in postwar America the perception of growing youth crime – or as it was then puritanically labelled, 'juvenile delinquency' – was causing a great deal of concern for leading members of the US political, religious and media classes. Instead of investigating the genuine underlying causes of such a phenomenon, the establishment blamed a burgeoning popular culture industry for the growth of the rebellious 'teen-age' child. We’re familiar with such protestations being aimed at the rise of rock 'n' roll, TV and popular film, but we’re less inclined to think 'comic book' when considering what may have been the primary focus of such historical 'moral majority' outrage. This is where David Hajdu's excellent The Ten-Cent Plague – The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America sets the record straight.

Hajdu's epic tome tells the astonishing story of the rise and fall of the postwar comic book industry, focusing in particular on the story of Bill Gaines, maverick owner of the nowlegendary EC Comics. Gaines and business partner Al Feldstein were responsible for the creation of the horror genre of comics that boasted titles such as The Crypt of Terror and The Vault of Horror. Such a development was an attempt to distinguish their product from the hundreds of crime and romance titles that then saturated the market, bearing in mind that, by the late 1940s, 100 million comic books were being bought by American kids every month. The content of Gaines’s horror titles didn’t however vary much from that of their corunners – they were in the main puerile, adolescent, grotesque and full of kitsch violence, brilliantly conceived and illustrated by collaborative teams of writers and artists hailing from every corner of American life. Here, then, an industry created by a renegade group of perceived outsiders had got the ear of a ravenous audience (primarily under the age of eighteen) desperate to give voice to what were, until then, repressed flights of fancy.

The backlash was crippling, started by the Catholic Church and developed through the early part of the 1950s against a backdrop of increasing paranoia and the rapacious antics of McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunts. First came the vigilante book-burnings, then the dodgy research, then the Senate hearings, then the highly restrictive censoring laws and then the blacklisting of the artists and writers who could no longer be paid by their titles. Hajdu's great skill throughout is to humanise the impact of such protests and subsequent legislation by highlighting the charismatic personalities of the comics' creators and the aggressive triviality of their detractors. He also provides a timely reminder of how self-proclaimed moral authorities always intimidate those who value the notion of individual autonomy first, and that somewhere from within the milieu of contemporary culture a scapegoat for society's ills can always be found. We have been warned.

IN PRINT: Issue 24, July/ August 2008