The Ten-Cent Plague

At a time when adults worry about young people’s consumption of video games, websites, and music genres such as hip-hop—despite the fact that what’s on the news is just as disturbing as what’s in Grand Theft Auto—comics seem pretty harmless. And with Pulitzer-winning Maus creator Art Spiegelman cocurating the Vancouver Art Gallery’s big summer show, KRAZY!, it’s hard to imagine that comics were once seen as a serious threat to American society.

In The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, David Hajdu, a professor at Columbia University and a contributor to The New Republic, charts the development of comics, from the birth of newspaper strips at the turn of the 20th century to the evolution of comic books, starting in the 1930s. As Hadju points out, by the mid-1940s, comic books were more popular than TV, radio, movies, or magazines, selling at a rate of 80 to 100 million copies a week.

But in the 1950s, comic books—particularly those depicting crime and horror—were condemned by the media, parents, church groups, politicians, and mental-health experts as a cause of juvenile delinquency. Following book burnings, laws restricting distribution, and Senate hearings, in 1954 the industry sealed its fate with a Comics Code (enforced by its own censorship office), featuring rules such as “Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities” and “Policemen, judges, government officials and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority”.

This latter prohibition clashed with what Hajdu describes as “the cynicism toward authority [that was] elemental to the comics’ nature as an outlet of expression for artists and writers who saw themselves as cultural outcasts”. From the start, the industry had welcomed immigrants, Jews, blacks, and other marginalized people. Comics were created by minorities for another group that lacked power: youth.

Underground comics would come on the scene in the late ’60s and graphic novels more recently, but the damage was done. The book closes with a 15-page list of people who never returned to the comics industry after the ’50s. While the events of that decade undoubtedly had a significant impact on American culture, they seem more cyclical than exceptional, the story all too typical of society’s struggles over childhood and creative expression.