From the Bookshelf: The Ten-Cent Plague
Jun. 3rd, 2019 08:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerIt was somehow tempting to see even a little dissonance in a book about “American comics” spotted at an anime convention, but its being heavily marked down offered a different temptation to buy it. Working my way through David Hajdu’s “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America” over the next week (while dealing with a cold it’s tempting in a different way again to blame on being in such a crowd), I recalled having heard a bit about the book when it had first been published over ten years before and glancing into it in the ship’s library on a cruise not that many years back, but also kept comparing it to a few other histories involving “the comic book scare” I’d read before.
Hajdu’s work leads off with the first turn-of-the-twentieth-century American comic strips and their own struggles with respectability, making the quick suggestion the First World War got in the way of open attacks on them. (So far as their growing respectability went, there’s an aside about Ronald Reagan doodling Popeye cartoons from his early years during presidential meetings; however, at about the same point in the book there was what struck me as an error in giving the year Dick Tracy started, the sort of thing that can leave me wondering about all the other specific facts in the book.) Comic books as distinct from strips were, as I’d seen in other books before, suggested to begin as a refuge for people who couldn’t succeed at getting strips in newspapers (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster hadn’t managed to sell Superman as a strip before they wound up in comic books), and the Second World War was suggested to head off the first disapprovals of something so garish and pitched at a young audience. (So far as comic strip artists being able to look down on comic books go, I have noticed over the years some early Peanuts strips where Charlie Brown and company are voracious readers of dodgy-looking comic books, until all of a sudden in the mid-1950s they seem more interested in watching television...)
One thing I did notice about Hajdu’s book was the steady suggestion comic books remained “for kids,” continuing to be read by them rather than a hypothetical audience growing up over the 1940s as superheroes faded, crime comics rose, romance comics followed, and horror comics marked a final grotesque flowering only to really get tastemakers worked up. One effort at a more substantial comics work (a “picture novel” named “It Rhymes with Lust”) was described, but wasn’t sold well “ahead of its time.”
While there are other works described that fill out the story as I’ve heard it, the book eventually focuses on EC Comics, cause and martyr in the familiar narrative. Hajdu offers a detailed description of EC publisher Bill Gaines’s disintegrating testimony at a hearing into comic books as the dexedrine he’d been taking wore off. With that, things pretty much closed down with the Comics Code and television managing to wind up less insipid than what comics were left, and Gaines went on to turn his last comic book into MAD magazine, rooting “disrespect for authority” in popular culture as we know it.
There were brief mentions in the book of efforts to remove American comic books from Canada and Britain (small echoes of comic book burnings in the United States that got some kids involved as others argued for their own right to see things adults didn’t approve of), although in the context of where I bought the book I did wonder a bit about the narratives that eventually became available even to English-speakers like me about comics not getting “pinched off too soon” in Europe and Japan. The book was a useful enough second perspective to compare against Gerard Jones’s “Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book” (which had interested me when I first read it for personalizing the “shadowy corporate forces” Siegel and Shuster sold their rights to and suggesting this might have been a little more nuanced than the already traditional narratives had it).
Hajdu’s work leads off with the first turn-of-the-twentieth-century American comic strips and their own struggles with respectability, making the quick suggestion the First World War got in the way of open attacks on them. (So far as their growing respectability went, there’s an aside about Ronald Reagan doodling Popeye cartoons from his early years during presidential meetings; however, at about the same point in the book there was what struck me as an error in giving the year Dick Tracy started, the sort of thing that can leave me wondering about all the other specific facts in the book.) Comic books as distinct from strips were, as I’d seen in other books before, suggested to begin as a refuge for people who couldn’t succeed at getting strips in newspapers (Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster hadn’t managed to sell Superman as a strip before they wound up in comic books), and the Second World War was suggested to head off the first disapprovals of something so garish and pitched at a young audience. (So far as comic strip artists being able to look down on comic books go, I have noticed over the years some early Peanuts strips where Charlie Brown and company are voracious readers of dodgy-looking comic books, until all of a sudden in the mid-1950s they seem more interested in watching television...)
One thing I did notice about Hajdu’s book was the steady suggestion comic books remained “for kids,” continuing to be read by them rather than a hypothetical audience growing up over the 1940s as superheroes faded, crime comics rose, romance comics followed, and horror comics marked a final grotesque flowering only to really get tastemakers worked up. One effort at a more substantial comics work (a “picture novel” named “It Rhymes with Lust”) was described, but wasn’t sold well “ahead of its time.”
While there are other works described that fill out the story as I’ve heard it, the book eventually focuses on EC Comics, cause and martyr in the familiar narrative. Hajdu offers a detailed description of EC publisher Bill Gaines’s disintegrating testimony at a hearing into comic books as the dexedrine he’d been taking wore off. With that, things pretty much closed down with the Comics Code and television managing to wind up less insipid than what comics were left, and Gaines went on to turn his last comic book into MAD magazine, rooting “disrespect for authority” in popular culture as we know it.
There were brief mentions in the book of efforts to remove American comic books from Canada and Britain (small echoes of comic book burnings in the United States that got some kids involved as others argued for their own right to see things adults didn’t approve of), although in the context of where I bought the book I did wonder a bit about the narratives that eventually became available even to English-speakers like me about comics not getting “pinched off too soon” in Europe and Japan. The book was a useful enough second perspective to compare against Gerard Jones’s “Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book” (which had interested me when I first read it for personalizing the “shadowy corporate forces” Siegel and Shuster sold their rights to and suggesting this might have been a little more nuanced than the already traditional narratives had it).