ABFFE Book of the Month: The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu

Interview with the Author

ABFFE: Why did you decide to write about comics?

DAVID HAJDU: I wanted to write about the hysteria over comics in the early postwar years in part because it's a largely forgotten chapter of American cultural history.  The story of how the lurid comics of that period challenged the aesthetic and social conventions of the time -- and, as a consequence, incited the ire of protectors of the status quo -- had not been fully told.

As a journalist who writes history, I was drawn to this story because it was one that could be told through the testimony of the first-hand witnesses of the events.  I was able to talk to the people who were there -- the writers and artists who made those comics all those years ago, as well as the kids who treasured them (and who are now parents and even grandparents of other kids).

ABFFE: Were comics always controversial?

DAVID HAJDU: One of the big surprises of my research was how long comics have been held in suspicion -- and, to varying degrees at different times, in contempt by the cultural establishment.  A century ago, the very first comics -- the newspaper funnies of the Yellow Kid era -- were considered vulgar, sub-literate, and corruptive.

When early comic books became popular in the 1930s, they were accused of the same sins as the old newspaper comics, which had by then achieved a degree of respectability!  Comics were an accommodating target.  At first, they were criticized for being juvenile, poorly written and drawn, and bad for vision.  Then, the church criticized them for being pagan and for inciting idolatry.  In the early years of the Second World War, they were considered Fascist.  Then, they were Communist.  Finally, the criticism of comics fixed on the issue of juvenile delinquency, and they became the focus of a battle between two generations.

ABFFE: Why did they become a target during the 1950s?

DAVID HAJDU: As I put the issue in my book: I see the panic over comic books as something that falls somewhere between the Red Scare and the frenzy over UFO sightings among the pathologies of postwar America.  Like Communism, comics were an old problem that suddenly seemed changed, darkened, growing out of control.  Like flying saucers, meanwhile, comics were wild stuff with the garish aura of pulp fantasy.

Comic books were a peril from within, though, rather than one from a foreign country or another planet.  The line dividing the comics' advocates and opponents was generational, rather than geographic. While many of the actions to curtail comics were attempts to protect the young, they were also efforts to protect the culture at large from the young.  Encoded in much of the ranting about comic books and juvenile delinquency were fears not only of what comics readers might become, but of what they already were -- that is, a generation of people developing their own interests and tastes, along with a determination to indulge them.

ABFFE: How effective was the censorship campaign?

DAVID HAJDU: It was devastating.  The title of my book has two meanings: To those crusading against them, comics were a plague on American youth.  To the young writers and artists who made comics, however, the crusade against comics was the plague.

Literally hundreds of comics creators were driven out of work by the purge against comics, and many of them were never published again.

Their plight has obvious parallels to the blacklisted writers of the Red Scare, though, to me, it's uniquely tragic.

ABFFE: When did comics reemerge as a creative force?

DAVID HAJDU: Comics began to recover in the 1960s, as the paranoia of the postwar era abated.  But they never again became what they once were: the most popular and influential form of entertainment in America.

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