An interesting article.
When U.S. trembled in fear of comics
In the first decade after World War II, Americans were terrified. First there was the Communist threat. Then the UFO menace. And then came the comic-book scare.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, more than 20 states and dozens of cities passed laws regulating "objectionable" comic books. Children were encouraged to turn in their comics, which were burned in public bonfires - a chilling reminder of Nazi Germany. A clerk was arrested for selling a copy of "Crime Does Not Pay" to a teen-ager. And so on.
David Hajdu documents this era in his new book, "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $26). He's covering ground familiar to any fan of comics history or postwar American culture. Hajdu simply amasses more facts than any previous attempt at chronicling this sad time. Despite a few errors - Dick Tracy made his debut in 1931, not 1929 - the book is worth reading.
Comic books were created in the 1930s by young writers and artists who tended to see themselves as outsiders. The field attracted Jews, Italians, blacks, Asians and women - people marginalized in mainstream society. Many of them were children of immigrants; virtually all came from working-class backgrounds.
In the late '40s, superheroes lost popularity. Readers preferred new genres such as crime, horror and romance. Some of these comics went beyond the level of violence and sexual suggestiveness allowed in movies of the time. The only real equivalent was the tough-guy prose of Mickey Spillane - a former comic-book writer. Comics also drew more female readers than before or since. Sales reached an all-time peak in the early '50s.
It didn't take long for institutions like the Catholic Church, the American Legion and PTAs to declare comic books a threat to Our American Way of Life. As artist Al Williamson said, 1953 was "a bad time to be weird." This was before "On the Road." Rock 'n' roll was still called rhythm and blues, and few middle-class white adults knew it existed. Unless you lived in Greenwich Village and hung out in jazz clubs and coffee houses, Bohemia was an alien concept.
Hajdu argues that comics drove an early wedge between the tastes of young people and their parents. The cycle is repeated whenever a new form of expression upsets the older generations: TV, rock music, the New Hollywood films of the late '60s and '70s, hip-hop, video games, MySpace and YouTube.
The years before Elvis and Chuck Berry may have seemed bleak, but for one thin dime - the price of a comic book - you could escape into the "subversive" world of EC Comics. EC exposed racism, police corruption and phony patriotism. Its war comics - influenced by the country's ambivalent attitude toward the Korean War - depicted GIs not as conquering supermen, but as jittery kids. The one surviving EC comic, "Mad," ridiculed every authority figure under the sun.
Unfortunately, EC also produced some of the bloodiest crime and horror comics. This drew the attention of police departments, prosecutors and editorial writers - not to mention a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham, whose book "Seduction of the Innocent" blamed comic books for juvenile delinquency. At a 1954 Senate hearing, Tennessee's Estes Kefauver eviscerated EC publisher William Gaines.
The panicked industry adopted a repressive Comics Code, and EC was soon out of business - except for "Mad," which bypassed the Code by converting to a black and white magazine.
Although a Tennessee senator was linked to the comics crackdown, Hajdu doesn't mention any city in Tennessee that passed, or even proposed, laws banning or restricting comic-book sales. Kefauver wasn't in charge of the committee on juvenile delinquency, anyway; that "honor" went to Robert Hendrickson, Republican from New Jersey.
It's easy to over-romanticize the pre-Code era and EC in particular. EC had the best art of the '50s, but aside from Harvey Kurtzman's scripts for "Mad" and the war comics, its writing was far from great. Comics critic Douglas Wolk has pointed out that for every brilliant story like "Master Race" (one of the first acknowledgements of the Holocaust in pop culture), EC published "half a dozen dumb gross-outs."
Hajdu's conclusion, backed by an interview with underground cartoonist-crank Robert Crumb, is that creativity in comic books died with EC. I can't go along with that. Stan Lee's Marvel Comics, at least in the '60s and early '70s, matched EC for talent and ambition. There is too much current emphasis on superheroes, but a medium that has produced "Watchmen," "Sandman," "Persepolis," "Maus," "American Splendor" and "Ghost World" can't be dismissed as creatively bankrupt.
If you have the money, you can seek out the "EC Archives." These deluxe hardcover reprints cost $50 per volume - a price that will presumably prevent a new generation of children from reading them and becoming "corrupted."
Taken from ...
In the first decade after World War II, Americans were terrified. First there was the Communist threat. Then the UFO menace. And then came the comic-book scare.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, more than 20 states and dozens of cities passed laws regulating "objectionable" comic books. Children were encouraged to turn in their comics, which were burned in public bonfires - a chilling reminder of Nazi Germany. A clerk was arrested for selling a copy of "Crime Does Not Pay" to a teen-ager. And so on.
David Hajdu documents this era in his new book, "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $26). He's covering ground familiar to any fan of comics history or postwar American culture. Hajdu simply amasses more facts than any previous attempt at chronicling this sad time. Despite a few errors - Dick Tracy made his debut in 1931, not 1929 - the book is worth reading.
Comic books were created in the 1930s by young writers and artists who tended to see themselves as outsiders. The field attracted Jews, Italians, blacks, Asians and women - people marginalized in mainstream society. Many of them were children of immigrants; virtually all came from working-class backgrounds.
In the late '40s, superheroes lost popularity. Readers preferred new genres such as crime, horror and romance. Some of these comics went beyond the level of violence and sexual suggestiveness allowed in movies of the time. The only real equivalent was the tough-guy prose of Mickey Spillane - a former comic-book writer. Comics also drew more female readers than before or since. Sales reached an all-time peak in the early '50s.
It didn't take long for institutions like the Catholic Church, the American Legion and PTAs to declare comic books a threat to Our American Way of Life. As artist Al Williamson said, 1953 was "a bad time to be weird." This was before "On the Road." Rock 'n' roll was still called rhythm and blues, and few middle-class white adults knew it existed. Unless you lived in Greenwich Village and hung out in jazz clubs and coffee houses, Bohemia was an alien concept.
Hajdu argues that comics drove an early wedge between the tastes of young people and their parents. The cycle is repeated whenever a new form of expression upsets the older generations: TV, rock music, the New Hollywood films of the late '60s and '70s, hip-hop, video games, MySpace and YouTube.
The years before Elvis and Chuck Berry may have seemed bleak, but for one thin dime - the price of a comic book - you could escape into the "subversive" world of EC Comics. EC exposed racism, police corruption and phony patriotism. Its war comics - influenced by the country's ambivalent attitude toward the Korean War - depicted GIs not as conquering supermen, but as jittery kids. The one surviving EC comic, "Mad," ridiculed every authority figure under the sun.
Unfortunately, EC also produced some of the bloodiest crime and horror comics. This drew the attention of police departments, prosecutors and editorial writers - not to mention a psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham, whose book "Seduction of the Innocent" blamed comic books for juvenile delinquency. At a 1954 Senate hearing, Tennessee's Estes Kefauver eviscerated EC publisher William Gaines.
The panicked industry adopted a repressive Comics Code, and EC was soon out of business - except for "Mad," which bypassed the Code by converting to a black and white magazine.
Although a Tennessee senator was linked to the comics crackdown, Hajdu doesn't mention any city in Tennessee that passed, or even proposed, laws banning or restricting comic-book sales. Kefauver wasn't in charge of the committee on juvenile delinquency, anyway; that "honor" went to Robert Hendrickson, Republican from New Jersey.
It's easy to over-romanticize the pre-Code era and EC in particular. EC had the best art of the '50s, but aside from Harvey Kurtzman's scripts for "Mad" and the war comics, its writing was far from great. Comics critic Douglas Wolk has pointed out that for every brilliant story like "Master Race" (one of the first acknowledgements of the Holocaust in pop culture), EC published "half a dozen dumb gross-outs."
Hajdu's conclusion, backed by an interview with underground cartoonist-crank Robert Crumb, is that creativity in comic books died with EC. I can't go along with that. Stan Lee's Marvel Comics, at least in the '60s and early '70s, matched EC for talent and ambition. There is too much current emphasis on superheroes, but a medium that has produced "Watchmen," "Sandman," "Persepolis," "Maus," "American Splendor" and "Ghost World" can't be dismissed as creatively bankrupt.
If you have the money, you can seek out the "EC Archives." These deluxe hardcover reprints cost $50 per volume - a price that will presumably prevent a new generation of children from reading them and becoming "corrupted."
Taken from ...
posted by Mark A Lester at
1:44 PM
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