Book Review

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
David Hajdu

This book is about the problems in America in the late 1940's and early 1950's with comic books. There were a few types of comic books in the late 40's, superhero comics, romance comics, and crime comics. It sounds like there were a lot of crime comics. At some point, people started trying to link these crime comics to the rise in juvenile delinquency. Some cities banned certain comics. Some places organized comic book burnings.

After the crime comics started getting into trouble, some comic publishers started moving to horror comics. Eventually the hysteria moved to these comics. Around the same time as the McCarthy hearings, there were also congressional hearings on comic books.

The comic book industry started censoring their own comics for a while, and comic books nearly died off in the 50's.

My guess is that these days, some comic books are as bad or worse than the comics that people were going crazy about in the 50's. I thought the book was interesting, it was a pretty well written account on what happened back in those days.

I don't have a problem with comics, really, but don't review the entire spectrum of comics. We stick to super hero comics in our house. I have a few comic titles delivered here for the girls. They get "Scooby Doo", "Looney Tunes", "Tiny Titans", "DC Super Friends", "Legion of Super Heroes", and "The Batman Strikes". These are all fairly tame comic books, just about the right speed for the girls.

I think some of the comics today are too graphic or violent in some cases, and now they have a super hero character that is openly gay. I really think the comic industry has some sort of agenda on what they want to do, and comics are getting worse these days, but I don't think society today really cares at this point, at least not like they did back in the 50's.

Anyway, this book was an interesting review of the craziness (on both sides of the issue) regarding comic books in the early 1950s.