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Step aside, Elvis; comics changed it all
Though he exaggerates their importance, the author unearths a forgotten story of censorship.
The Ten-Cent Plague:
The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
By David Hadju Farrar, Straus & Giroux 434 pp., $26.
Reviewed by Dan DeLuca
David Hajdu loads the lowly comic book with a mighty burden. Conventional wisdom has it that when the time came to set off the youthquake of the 1950s, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were the agents of change, with help from Marlon Brando, James Dean, and the Beat poets. Hajdu is here to tell us different. He is a perspicacious critic whose excellent previous books include Lush Life, a biography of jazz composer Billy Strayhorn, and Positively Fourth Street, a study of the '60s Greenwich Village folk music circle revolving around Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Mimi and Richard Farina. Hajdu begins his thoroughly researched book The Ten- Cent Plague with pioneering turn-of-the-20th-century newspaper strips like The Yellow Kid and Little Nemo in Slumberland. He then chronicles the rise of superhero stalwarts such as Superman and Wonder Woman in the 1930s and '40s, and ends with the crackdown on crime and horror comics in the 1950s. In the book's prologue, Hajdu writes that "through the near death of comic books and the end of many of their makers' creative lives, postwar popular culture was born." Going further, he argues that the comics controversy - a "largely forgotten history of the culture wars" - defies the "now-common notions about the evolution of twentieth century popular culture, including the conception of the postwar sensibility . . . as something spawned by rock and roll. The truth is more complex. Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry added the soundtrack to a scene created in comic books." Hajdu, who will discuss his book at 7 Tuesday night at the Free Library of Philadelphia, makes a case for the importance of comics in creating the pop-culture world we live in. His slow-building narrative is peopled with characters as colorful as the shamelessly shocking picture stories they created. (Unfortunately, Ten-Cent Plague is not literally as colorful as the often brazenly subversive comics whose creation it chronicles. It does boast a fiendishly funny full-color jacket by Philadelphia artist Charles Burns, but it contains a scant eight black-and-white pages of photos and illustrations, thus frustrating any instinct of readers to see for themselves what iconic comics such as Will Eisner's naturalistic Spirit actually looked like.) Ten-Cent Plague tells of "cultural insurgents" whose work often inspired hysteria as it pitted comic-reading kids against parents and sanctimonious cultural commissars like Fredric Werthham. Werthham's 1954 screed against the evils of comics, The Seduction of the Innocent, convincingly debunked by Hajdu, was a key weapon - along with the Ladies' Home Journal and a congressional committee headed by Sen. Estes Kefauver - in a crusade that brought the comic industry to its knees. Hajdu builds to the failed, Dexedrine-fueled testimony of EC Comics head and Mad Magazine founder William Gaines before the Kefauver committee in 1954, which led to the institution of an upright Comics Code that doomed the industry to irrelevance in the arriving age of television. Along the way, Hajdu makes room for such youth-culture flashpoints as the Los Angeles Zoot Suit riots of 1943 and the juvenile delinquency scare of the '50s as it related to Marlon Brando's 1953 depiction of a leather-clad motorcycle rider in Laszlo Benedek's The Wild One. Hajdu doesn't quite succeed in convincing us that the comic culture wars were as paramount in shaping the postwar pop cultural prism as he makes them out to be. It's undeniable that the clashes between comic publishers and their watchdogs were precursors of the cultural conflagration that fear of hip-shaking licentiousness set off in the immediate wake of the collapse of the comic industry. But while Hajdu does laudable work in bringing an instructive, forgotten story to light - and one that bears remembering at a time when video games and hip-hop are similarly excoriated - he overreaches in claiming that comics were the womb from which pop culture as we know it sprang to life. As if aware of that himself, Hajdu backs away slightly at the end. He concludes that comics "helped give birth to the popular culture of the postwar era," rather than asserting that they set the scene for which rock- and-roll provided the soundtrack. That sounds more like it.
Contact music critic Dan DeLuca at 215-854-5628 or ddeluca@phillynews.com.
The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
By David Hadju Farrar, Straus & Giroux 434 pp., $26.
Reviewed by Dan DeLuca
David Hajdu loads the lowly comic book with a mighty burden. Conventional wisdom has it that when the time came to set off the youthquake of the 1950s, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were the agents of change, with help from Marlon Brando, James Dean, and the Beat poets. Hajdu is here to tell us different. He is a perspicacious critic whose excellent previous books include Lush Life, a biography of jazz composer Billy Strayhorn, and Positively Fourth Street, a study of the '60s Greenwich Village folk music circle revolving around Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Mimi and Richard Farina. Hajdu begins his thoroughly researched book The Ten- Cent Plague with pioneering turn-of-the-20th-century newspaper strips like The Yellow Kid and Little Nemo in Slumberland. He then chronicles the rise of superhero stalwarts such as Superman and Wonder Woman in the 1930s and '40s, and ends with the crackdown on crime and horror comics in the 1950s. In the book's prologue, Hajdu writes that "through the near death of comic books and the end of many of their makers' creative lives, postwar popular culture was born." Going further, he argues that the comics controversy - a "largely forgotten history of the culture wars" - defies the "now-common notions about the evolution of twentieth century popular culture, including the conception of the postwar sensibility . . . as something spawned by rock and roll. The truth is more complex. Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry added the soundtrack to a scene created in comic books." Hajdu, who will discuss his book at 7 Tuesday night at the Free Library of Philadelphia, makes a case for the importance of comics in creating the pop-culture world we live in. His slow-building narrative is peopled with characters as colorful as the shamelessly shocking picture stories they created. (Unfortunately, Ten-Cent Plague is not literally as colorful as the often brazenly subversive comics whose creation it chronicles. It does boast a fiendishly funny full-color jacket by Philadelphia artist Charles Burns, but it contains a scant eight black-and-white pages of photos and illustrations, thus frustrating any instinct of readers to see for themselves what iconic comics such as Will Eisner's naturalistic Spirit actually looked like.) Ten-Cent Plague tells of "cultural insurgents" whose work often inspired hysteria as it pitted comic-reading kids against parents and sanctimonious cultural commissars like Fredric Werthham. Werthham's 1954 screed against the evils of comics, The Seduction of the Innocent, convincingly debunked by Hajdu, was a key weapon - along with the Ladies' Home Journal and a congressional committee headed by Sen. Estes Kefauver - in a crusade that brought the comic industry to its knees. Hajdu builds to the failed, Dexedrine-fueled testimony of EC Comics head and Mad Magazine founder William Gaines before the Kefauver committee in 1954, which led to the institution of an upright Comics Code that doomed the industry to irrelevance in the arriving age of television. Along the way, Hajdu makes room for such youth-culture flashpoints as the Los Angeles Zoot Suit riots of 1943 and the juvenile delinquency scare of the '50s as it related to Marlon Brando's 1953 depiction of a leather-clad motorcycle rider in Laszlo Benedek's The Wild One. Hajdu doesn't quite succeed in convincing us that the comic culture wars were as paramount in shaping the postwar pop cultural prism as he makes them out to be. It's undeniable that the clashes between comic publishers and their watchdogs were precursors of the cultural conflagration that fear of hip-shaking licentiousness set off in the immediate wake of the collapse of the comic industry. But while Hajdu does laudable work in bringing an instructive, forgotten story to light - and one that bears remembering at a time when video games and hip-hop are similarly excoriated - he overreaches in claiming that comics were the womb from which pop culture as we know it sprang to life. As if aware of that himself, Hajdu backs away slightly at the end. He concludes that comics "helped give birth to the popular culture of the postwar era," rather than asserting that they set the scene for which rock- and-roll provided the soundtrack. That sounds more like it.
Author Appearance
David Hajdu will be at the Free Library of Philadelphia, 1901 Vine St., Tuesday night at 7. No admission charge. For information, call 215-567-4341.Contact music critic Dan DeLuca at 215-854-5628 or ddeluca@phillynews.com.
