Below is my review of Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague, which originally ran in the Globe and Mail on March 22, 2008. After the review there is a brief post-script.

THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE

The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America

By David Hajdu

Books, if Ray Bradbury is to be trusted, burn at a temperature of Fahrenheit 451; old comic books, printed as they were on cheap newsprint, are easier to kindle. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, thousands of American kids discovered just how flammable comic books could be. Egged on by parents, teachers and such guardians of piety and patriotism as the Catholic Church and the American Legion, countless children (sometimes willingly, but often reluctantly) participated in schoolyard re-enactments of the Bonfire of the Vanities, setting aflame horror and crime comic books that allegedly had the power to corrupt their young innocence and transform them into juvenile delinquents. (It is highly probable that among the comics burned were copies of the EC Comics series Weird Science-Fantasy, which, appropriately enough, published adaptations of Ray Bradbury stories.)

The postwar anti-comics movement, an astonishing outburst of media-induced hysteria, originated in the United States but had repercussions in many lands, including England, Mexico, Taiwan, the Philippines and Canada. In 1949, E. Davie Fulton, an up-and-coming Tory MP from British Columbia, got Parliament to pass a private member’s bill banning crime comics from our pristine dominion. Fulton’s efforts were loudly praised by a 10-year-old Baie Comeau boy named Brian Mulroney, who delivered an award-winning speech denouncing crime comics. [Mulroney, of course, would go on to become Prime Mininister of Canada from 1984 to 1993.]

Mulroney’s fledgling, prepubescent foray into Conservative politics was a transparent and treasonous attempt to win brownie points from authority figures by condemning reading material that many of his age-mates loved. (Intriguingly, Fulton would later serve as a mentor to Mulroney.)

In 2008, it’s hard to believe that comic books could be the centre of heated political disputes, but in early days of the Cold War, comics were as controversial as communism. In his splendid new cultural history The Ten-Cent Plague , respected U.S. cultural critic David Hajdu vividly brings this half-remembered debate to life, showing that the fierce struggle over comics was an important battle in a cultural war over youth and freedom that continues to rage to this day.

Comic books were born in the Depression-era United States as a tawdry, plebian offshoot of the more respectable Sunday funnies which ran in newspapers. Initially, comic books merely reprinted and imitated such established comic strip stars as Buck Rogers and the Katzenjammer Kids, but in the late 1930s, the medium was seized by a cohort of very young would-be cartoonists, often just teenagers who had no other prospect open to them.

These cartoonists were a rag-tag collection of outsiders: Many were first- and second-generation immigrant Jews and Catholics; some were African-Americans; others artistically inclined young women who were hampered by sexism from working at ad agencies or newspapers. What united them was a Depression-fuelled desperation to turn their pulp-fiction-inspired dreams into bright, four-colour fantasies. Although they worked for fly-by-night publishers in sweatshop-like conditions, putting out garishly produced pamphlets that were sold for a dime to children, these pioneering cartoonists created a pantheon of heroes that would soon define U.S. culture: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Plastic Man and many others. It’s a world that is superbly recreated in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay .

The early comics were something new in youth culture: They were not only made for children, they were often made by children, or near-children. Jerry Siegel and Torontonian Joe Shuster were all of 19 when they created Superman, and actually a notch older than many of their comic-book peers. The rawness of adolescence defined the aesthetics of early comics, which were often crude, rowdy, disrespectful, violent and sexually provocative. In their early adventures, Batman used a gun to execute his enemies and Wonder Woman tied up her foes in S & M gear that any dominatrix would envy.

As cartoonists grew older, they didn’t necessarily mature. Comics flourished in the low-rent district of the mass media, far from the respectable precincts ruled by Time magazine and the Saturday Evening Post. Many of the early publishers also specialized in girlie magazines, dirty “joke” books and blood-and-guts pulps. In this environment, cartoonists remained natural outsiders: Ethnically, aesthetically, socially and economically, they had little in common with the cool, white-bread norms that would, stereotypically and falsely, define the early postwar years.

After the superheroes, the next big trend was crime comics, which overtly preached a message that “Crime does not pay” while covertly glamorizing gangsters for breaking all the rules, solidifying the reputation comics had as an outlaw art form. Even as politicians like Fulton and young master Mulroney were decrying crime comics, an even more controversial genre emerged. Under the madcap captaincy of William Gaines, EC Comics started publishing horror comics filled with grisly, viscerally potent stories filled with ax murderers, zombies and dismembered corpses. (Many famous writers and filmmakers – including Stephen King, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter – grew up on these comics and have spent a lifetime drawing inspiration from their imaginative bloodiness and transgressive daring.)

EC’s line of horror comics, executed with stylish art and literate scripts, were the exact opposite of the stereotypical image of 1950s culture as an Ozzie and Harriet celebration of suburban blandness and conformity. Equally subversive was another EC title: Mad, an uproariously satirical comic book that evolved into a magazine to keep the censors at bay. As Hajdu suggests, the wildness of the early comics prefigured the later rebelliousness of rock music: “Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry added the soundtrack to a scene created in comic books.”

These early comics were genuinely offensive; many of them remain shocking to this day, and it’s not surprising that the forces of adulthood and responsibility launched a counteroffensive. The anti-comics movement brought together a remarkably diverse alliance: parental groups, police forces, churches, politicians and psychiatrists. Condemning comics was one area where conservatives and communists could get along (in Britain and France, Marxist parties spearheaded the push against comics).

The intellectual leader of the anti-comics crowd was the German-born psychiatrist Fredric Wertham. Like many of the early cartoonists, Wertham was an immigrant, but he didn’t come out of the ghettos of Eastern Europe or the tenements of New York. He was an avatar of European high culture, fearful that the barbarism of fascism could be reborn in the United States. Superman reminded Wertham of the Übermensch exalted by Nietzsche and appropriated by Hitler.

Based on clinical work he did in a charitable hospital in Harlem, Wertham argued that almost all comic books stultified the imagination of normal kids and inspired the more vulnerable to become criminals. In denigrating comic books, Wertham used language as bold and unrestrained as anything found in a Batman story. “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry,” he once said.

Was Wertham right? He still has his defenders, notably Bart Beaty, a professor of communications at the University of Calgary, who champions Wertham as a progressive scholar who cared about the “the most defenseless portion of postwar American society, children.” Hajdu’s new book, brilliantly written and based on hundreds of interviews with cartoonists and comics readers, as well as book burners, serves as a powerful brief against Wertham and his allies. As Hajdu notices, the voices of children and cartoonists got lost into the cacophony of the anti-comics backlash.

Children loved most the very comics that Wertham and his ilk thought were especially harmful, in part because these comics possessed the true unruly spirit of youth. The childish imagination is nurtured not just by wholesome and didactic stories, but also by tales of bloodshed and vengeance, which bring good and evil vividly to life. Children need monsters and ghouls just as surely as they require parents and teachers.

Wertham titled his 1954 bestselling polemic Seduction of the Innocent . But the fact is that no child, no human, is fully innocent. The book burnings conducted by virtuous nuns and war vets were as traumatic as anything to be found in the worst comics.

The war between children and adults is as old as the human species. It’s a curious struggle that gets replicated generation after generation, always with ironic results. The kids who read horror comics in the 1950s are now approaching retirement. Some of them are aghast at video games and the Internet; others spend thousands of dollars hunting down the remaining copies of the comic books that were so cavalierly burned when they were young.

*****

Post-script (2010):

1. Not much to add: I still think Hajdu’s book is excellent and a high-water mark in the writing of comics history. It really is superbly researched in a way that most comics writing, whether by fans or academics is not: Every assertion in the book is documented and based on archival research or interviews (and almost all the interviews are fresh). One way of appreciating Hajdu’s book is to compare it to another fine book, Gerard Jones’ Men of Tomorrow. Jones’ volume is very strong, and in fact can be seen as a piv0tal gateway book to the new comics scholarship, inspiring a flood of research into such topics as Siegel and Shuster and the nexus between Jewish immigration and comics. Still, if it opened up a pathway into deeper research, Jones’ book can also be seen as the culmination of an older tradition of fan scholarship. For my taste, Jones relied a bit too heavily on hearsay and industry lore, although given the palpable lack of sources and resources at the time, it’s understandable why he leaned so much on oral history. Hajdu represents a step up from Jones in the careful use of sources (and now that so many letters and legal documents are coming to light, future historians will have to follow the Hajdu model of testing oral history against primary sources).

2. R. Fiore’s extended review essay (TCJ 294) and interview with Hajdu (TCJ 296) are both very good and useful supplements to the book.

3. Are there weaknesses in Hajdu? Like R. Fiore I thought he was a bit too dismissive of humour comics, which were as much an industry mainstay as superheroes or horror. You don’t get a sense from the book that far more kids were reading Dell comics, including the best work of Barks and Stanley, than reading EC. And many kids, like the young Crumb or S. Clay Wilson, read both.

4.  I wish Hajdu had been a bit more international in scope. The comics scare was genuinely transnational, manifesting itself in Mexico, England, Japan, Canada, the Philippines, and other countries. A few paragraphs about the international nature of the scare would have given an even greater resonance to the topic.

5. More could have been said about the efforts of “wholesome” cartoonists (the comic strip guys at the NCS, Dell Comics) to distance themselves from the horror comics. This too was subject to historical change. In 1948 Harold Gray and Al Capp both defended crime comics and in their own way critiqued the anti-comics scare. But by the early 1950s figures like Walt Kelly and Caniff were on the side of censorship. Why the change?

Labels: David Hajdu