Paul's Ten-Cent Plague review

Our fellow co-conspirator and partner-in-crime Paul Miles contributed to RevolutionSF an excellent review of David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (far superior to my own interpretation). As always, Paul argues many excellent points in some conventional ways. I'm betting not many reviewers mentioned (fittingly enough) Soupy Sales.

In The Ten Cent Plague: The Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America, David Hajdu suggests that the Frederic Wertham-inspired Senate hearings and local anti-comics censorship laws of the fifties were a witch-hunt that destroyed comics as a mass medium. I think he gets much closer to showing the first part of his theory but whiffs on the second.

Hajdu fetchingly recreates the New York centric world of the comic book. This has certainly been done before, most recently in Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow, but where Hajdu excels is in an emphasis on the industry’s underbelly. For the most part, he bypasses familiar companies like DC/National and Marvel/Timely to concentrate on lesser known creators and titles such as Charles Biro's over the top Crime Does Not Pay. The book is worth reading for this alone.
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