Books About Comics: The Plague Years

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on July 8, 2008 Sign up now!

By Peter Sanderson -- Publishers Weekly, 7/7/2008 3:47:00 PM

Among comic book aficionados, the dark days in the 1950s, when comics were accused of causing juvenile delinquency, have become a familiar if distant legend. In his new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, Professor David Hajdu of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, brings that legend to vivid life for a new generation of readers.

Hajdu identifies comic books as one of the first manifestations of a new phenomenon in American society after World War II: youth culture. He may be overstating comics’ importance through assertions like “Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry added the soundtrack to a scene created in comic books,” but his book makes clear that comics followed a path parallel to rock ’n’ roll’s. Both, according to Hajdu, expressed the rebellious sensibility of a new generation of adolescents.

Although EC’s horror comics, such as Tales from the Crypt, are most often identified as victims of the anti-comics crusade, Hajdu points out that it was the crime comics of the late 1940s, as pioneered by editor Charles Biro, that were the initial targets for turning criminals into their protagonists, though they were inevitably punished. Hajdu argues that the romance comics of the period presented characters who rebelled against moral conventions. Both the crime and romance comics explored characterization with more complexity than comic books had before, he says.

Of course, EC Comics produced enduring classics, most notably Harvey Kurtzman’s war books and the satiric Mad. In other words, postwar comics were becoming more sophisticated in story and art, and were building an increasingly older audience when the anti-comics backlash brought this evolution to an abrupt halt.

The furor over comics in postwar America was a conflict between the last generation to grow up before the rise of comic books and their children, who embraced this new medium as their own. Whereas comics have a niche market today, back then comic books were truly a mass medium.

Many comics readers know the name of Dr. Fredric Wertham, author of the book Seduction of the Innocent, which contended that comic books contributed to juvenile delinquency. Hajdu persuasively attacks Wertham’s methods for their lack of scientific standards. The title of Wertham’s book is a giveaway: it is as if parents imagined that their children were “innocents” who could not possibly conceive of wrongdoing on their own. Some sinister outside influence must be to blame, and comics, lacking adult readers and defenders, became easy targets for scapegoating.

Hajdu not only describes the infamous Congressional investigations of comics, but traces how states and cities throughout the country passed laws criminalizing the sales—and even the publication—of certain kinds of comics. Readers will rightly be shocked by Hajdu’s recounting of how ordinary Americans around the country staged book burnings of comics, an eerie imitation of Nazi book burnings of less than a decade before.

Amidst his portrait of American government witch-hunting comics creators, Hajdu also focuses on significant individuals. Comics creators Will Eisner and Harvey Kurtzman emerge as lonely visionaries decades ahead of their time. EC publisher William Gaines comes across as both heroic and flawed—an irreverent innovator whose confrontation with Congressional investigators proved both brave and disastrous.

Not only did the EC Comics line die, except for Mad, but the number of comics being published fell by well over half. Hajdu affectingly chronicles the human cost of the disaster that befell the comics industry. His book’s prologue introduces Janice Valleau, an artist driven from comics, a medium she loved, and even from art as a profession, by the public outrage against comic books. Hajdu quotes legendary DC artist Carmine Infantino: “It was like the plague. The work dried up, and you had nowhere to go, because comics were a dirty word...If you said you drew comic books, it was like saying you were a child molester.”

Some reviews of The Ten Cent Plague have criticized Hajdu for including as an appendix a list of over800 comics professionals who never worked in comic books again after the crackdown of the 1950s. But this is arguably the heart of the book. Some of the names are startlingly famous, the majority are obscure, but their sheer number is impressive. How different would the history of comic books have been if they had been able to continue their careers?

Though superb as historical narrative, Hajdu’s book has significant limitations. Apart from an eight-page section of photographs and cartoon art in the middle, it is a prose book without illustrations. Readers ideally should see some of these controversial comics stories to make their own aesthetic and moral judgments of the material. But they will have to track down reprints of the EC horror titles on their own; finding the Biro crime comics will be much harder.

Another limitation is that Hajdu is not a sociologist. He ultimately cannot explain the hysteria and paranoia behind the anti-comics crusade. Why didn’t the parents of the early 1950s simply forbid their children to read comics? Newer trends in popular culture, from gangsta rap to violent video games, have been accused of morally corrupting young people without leading to repressive legislation or neo-fascist equivalents of book burnings. Was juvenile delinquency really more of a threat in the early postwar years than it was before or since? Following World War II, did Americans still have a wartime mindset leading them to seek out and destroy real or imagined enemies? Hajdu links the anti-comics crusade with McCarthyism as manifestations of “the mounting resistance to all forms of heterodoxy in the sociopolitical climate.” But just why postwar America was so fervently intolerant of alternative ideas and values lies beyond the scope of this book.

Hajdu depicts the comics industry’s turn back to the superhero genre in the late 1950s and 1960s as a reversion to simpler, less sophisticated material. Yet in the 1960s Stan Lee’s Marvel turned superheroes into outsiders and outcasts, thereby, despite the new Comics Code’s restrictions, succeeding in appealing to readers’ sense of alienation, much as EC had. However, Hajdu ends his book with an interview with Robert Crumb, who explains how EC, especially Mad, inspired the underground comics of the 1960s, leading to the alternative comics revolution of recent years.

Back in the mid-1950s perhaps only Eisner could have imagined a time when comics would be regarded as a serious art form. But this is still not a universally held opinion, as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund could tell you. Anyone seriously interested in comics should read Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague to learn how deeply the culture’s disdain for the medium is rooted and how far comics’ reputation has come over the last half century.