Shameless Plug

My review of David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America ran in today's Austin Chronicle.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, these 10-cent illustrated pulp magazines – intended primarily for children – featured stories of superheroes, teen angst, crime, romance, and horror. Many individual issues sold in the millions of copies. To the ire of many "right-thinking" adults, these tales often contained such unsavory elements as sexual innuendo, detailed crime depictions, and excessive violence. Parent groups routinely blamed comic books for "juvenile delinquency." The hysteria reached a fever pitch with the publication of Fredric Wertham's controversial vilification of comic books, Seduction of the Innocent (1954). The ensuing televised congressional hearings almost destroyed the industry, forcing hundreds of publishers out of business and nearly 1,000 people out of work.
Continued...

Visionary Will Eisner Quote

In The Ten-Cent Plague, the forthcoming book about the 1950s comic book scare and the next book I'm reviewing for The Austin Chronicle, author David Hajdu reprints this paraphrase of Will Eisner from the Philadelphia Record, October 13, 1941:

The comic strip, he explains, is no longer a comic strip but, in reality, an illustrated novel. It is new and raw in form just now, but material for limitless intelligent development. And eventually and inevitably it will be a legitimate medium for the best writers and artists. It is already the embryo-- Eisner apologizes a little for the trite phrase-- of a new art form.

I always respected Eisner as an artistic visionary but this was 1941! Wow! Sterling North's "A National Disgrace" (Chicago Daily News, May 8, 1940), which begins "Virtually every child in America is reading color 'comic' magazines-- a posionouas mushroom growth of the last two years" was still very much in the public consciousness, making Eisner's pronouncement even that much more amazing. It took over fifty years, but damn if he wasn't right. And thankfully, he did get to see some of the realization before he died.