Created in the mid-'30s as
a means to re-package newspaper funnies for promotional purposes, the comic
book quickly developed a life beyond its creators' wildest dreams. The brightly
colored stories of violence and costumed heroics grabbed the minds of children
across the country by providing a level of entertainment which, for all its
clumsy inexperience, was unlike anything else. Artists and writers responded by
flocking to an art form with no expectations—so long as the pages hit the
printers on time, there were no guidelines to follow, and more importantly, no
social strictures on who could do what. But that freedom couldn't last forever,
and in the early '50s, a nation obsessed with solving exaggerated social
problems found the perfect scapegoat at the local newsstand.
David Hajdu's The
Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare And How It Changed America follows comics from their
infancy—when creators like Will Eisner developed their talents safe in
the knowledge that no one out of grade school would give a damn—through
the industry's boom period and the seemingly inevitable fallout, when
politicians and cultural mouthpieces blamed horror and crime comics for the
spread of juvenile delinquency. Hajdu describes mass book-burnings and
congressional hearings with an easy drama that makes them unsettlingly close to
home; apparently, censorship and vote-hungry politics never go out of style.
The victims of the purge are also well-drawn—William Gaines, owner of the
EC line that faced the brunt of the criticism (Tales From The Crypt, Crime
SuspenStories,
etc.), comes off less as a visionary than as a short-sighted chemistry teacher
in way over his head.
If there's a villain in Plague, it's Frederic Wertham,
author of the infamous 1954 comics exposé Seduction Of The Innocent; a psychiatrist with some
shoddy research and a knack for self-promotion, Wertham gave the growing
hysteria an illusion of scientific validity. Hajdu has a knack for vivid,
compassionate characterizations, and while Plague occasionally gets bogged
down in the details, it never loses sight of the excitement of the time, and
how quickly that excitement turned to panic. A little more study of the actual
comics in question would've been nice, but as a snapshot of an era, Plague is top-notch. If only its
concerns didn't seem quite so relevant.