The Ten Cent Plague

So What If They’re Just For Kids?

by Bob Proehl of Diagnosis: No Radio

Like jazz, the other great indigenous American art form, comic books started out produced almost exclusively by and for outsiders. In cramped New York City offices, young, hungry artists, unable to find work in the more established and lucrative field of formal illustration and largely of Jewish or Italian descent, with names like Eisner, Kane, Siegel, Schuster, Infantino, worked long hours for page rates, inventing the visual language of a new medium, unrestricted by the formal constraints of tradition or the content supervision of outside parties like the MPAA or the FCC.

Their audience was a group that had yet to be defined as a distinct demographic; “children’s entertainment” in the 1940s amounted to little more than guidebooks for teaching kids how to become well-adjusted adults. The idea that children might have tastes, might desire something in their entertainments other than primers on cultural conformity, was revolutionary. And like most revolutionary ideas, it quickly came into disfavor with those interested in maintaining the status quo.

In his latest book, “The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America“, David Hajdu, author of “Positively 4^th St” traces the rise and fall of the early comic book industry in post-war America. While most long-time comic book enthusiasts know some version of the story and can name check Wertham, the Code and EC Comics, Hajdu goes into painstaking detail in an attempt to tie the comic book scare to other oppressive cultural and political forces in 1950s, as well as mapping the rise of comic books onto the birth of youth culture.

Hajdu presents early comic book artists simultaneously as hacks and rebels. Many took work in comics to simply to pay the bills, shunning the idea that comics could ever be considered art, and even before the backlash against comics, working in the industry had a certain social stigma attached to it, due in part to anti-Semitic sentiments that persisted in the US even after the revelation of the Holocaust. Regardless of their artistic aspirations, these creators were, for the first time, giving kids what they wanted, and the kids were buying in droves. Even at 10 cents a copy, the comic book industry was making millions of dollars and reaching millions of readers in the early fifties. For a time, it was a more successful form of mass media than traditional print books or television.

Starting from this freewheeling period, when the market embraced superhero comics alongside romance, westerns, crime and horror, Hajdu slowly paints the story of the industry’s decline into violent self-censorship. The book centers on three characters: the iconoclastic Will Eisner, a business pioneer and artistic innovator, frustrated in his pursuit of artistic recognition to go along with his financial success, the tragic Bill Gaines, determined to make his company successful if only to spite the Christian conservative father he’d inherited EC Comics from and bullied into near bankruptcy by forces inside and outside comics, and the spectral Frederick Wertham, once a liberal minded clinician who opened the first mental health clinic in Harlem, convinced comic books were at the root of the rise in “delinquency”, a blanket term which covered every form of what we now accept as the standard rebellious nature of youth. Hajdu evokes an atmosphere of paranoia through descriptions of book burnings in the American heartland, only years after WWII and Senate hearings on comic books, sandwiched neatly between hearings on organized crime and the McCarthy hearings on the communist infiltration of the armed forces. The culture at large seemed to be strictly enforcing hegemony, eliminating anything outside the norm. “It was a bad time to be weird,” artist Al Williamson put it.

With an overload of detail, including a list of nearly 800 writers and artists eventually put out of work once the Comics Code eliminated most books on the shelves, Hajdu presents an almost untold story which makes the more well-known outcry against rock and roll seem like a faint echo. In fact, it’s a fight that has recurred throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first: a form of media specific to youth (heavy metal in the eighties, video games in the nineties) comes under fire from adult “watch-groups” who fail to understand something novel as anything but strange and therefore evil. Culminating in the introduction of the Comics Code, one of the most oppressive forms of regulation any media industry has imposed upon itself, the book expands on the standard narrative of Wertham as demonizing the evil trinity of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman as representatives of Fascism, Homosexuality and Sadomasochism (probably not how Kurt Busiek will be presenting the trio, but one can hope), to show an entire apparatus of parent’s groups, media groups and legislators, trying to make the case that taste lies solely in the hands of those in power; the tastes of comic book readers and creators are, by definition, “deviant”. The book shows one of the earliest battles between youth and authority. Authority may have won out, cursing comics with decades of Code-approved super heroics instead of the beautiful chaos of imagination that came before, but, inspired by the sheer uniqueness of comics, a medium all their own, youth was prepared for the next round.

Related posts

• No related posts.