The Ten-Cent Plague

If you need any more evidence that the 1950's in America was a lousy time to be alive, take a gander at The Ten-Cent Plague, by David Hadju, which tells the story of how comic books became front-page news and came under the thumb of blue-nosed authorities. It's a horror story that is worthy of any of the horror comics that were banned.

Hadju, who wrote a fine book about Bob Dylan and Joan Baez during the sixties (Positively Fourth Street), starts with a detailed history of the form, beginning with newspaper strips like The Yellow Kid and Krazy Kat and then the creation of the funnies in book form in the 1930's. It's interesting to read how interests changed: before and during World War II, superhero comics were all the rage, but they practically died out in favor of crime comics in the mid to late forties. Then came romance comics, and finally, in the early fifties, horror comics. Comic books were huge sellers, and there was a great monkey-see monkey-do attitude among the companies that produced them. Consider these titles of romance books: My Story, My Love Story, My Love Life, My Love Affair, My Love Secret, My Secret Affair, My Secret Life, My Private Life, and My Life. And these were all published by the same company.

Those that wrote and drew comics took them seriously, and some of them could certainly be considered art, such as the work of Will Eisner, who created The Spirit. But their popularity was mostly attributable to their appeal to children. Adults didn't read comic books in those days, so children had something that was entirely theirs. It was only when some adults started paying attention that things got bad.

Throughout the forties there were campaigns to censor comic books, including having them burned in pyres (often these were sponsored by otherwise wholesome organizations like the Girl Scouts). Some who participated, looking back, are regretful and recognize the similarities to Nazi book burnings. Dubious experts wrote tracts condemning comic books as influencing juvenile delinquency, even though there was no hard and fast evidence.

The furor really built in the early fifties, about the same time as the McCarthy era. A physician, Dr. Fredric Wertham, a long-time opponent of comic books, published a book called The Seduction of the Innocent, which had shoddy research methodology but was a sensation nonetheless. A congressional hearing was held, and William Gaines, the publisher of EC comics, which produced some of the more grisly horror comics, volunteered to testify. Gaines was the most obstinate of comics publishers, and inserted ads into his books claiming that those who favored censorship were Communist dupes. This didn't endear him to the committee.

Gaines, taking Dexedrine to stay awake, was grilled by the committee. Senator Estes Kefauver held up a blow-up of a cover that depicted a woman's severed head. Kefauver asked Gaines, "This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman's head up, which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?"

"Yes sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic," Gaines said. "A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody."

These niceties didn't go over well with the committee or the American public. Gaines tried to form a committee of his own of comic book publishers, but unwittingly this led to a comic books authority that would self-censor books so that they would be distributed and sold at newsstands (sort of like what would happen with films and the MPAA). Gaines refused to comply. The committee was so Draconian and arbitrary that comics lost whatever spice they had that made them popular, and sales plummeted. Self-censorship wasn't even good enough, and several states banned comic books that depicted certain behavior (and even any that had the words "horror" or "terror" in the titles. An era was over.

Comic books would rebound in the early sixties as the superhero re-emerged, but Hadju ends his story in the mid-fifties (I saw him give a talk on the book and he mentioned he had never read a Spider-Man comic). He is more interested in how American society, with a puritanical streak that can never be rubbed out, ended up stifling a creative enterprise and led to hundreds of people losing their jobs, all because people had a vague fear that reading these books would turn their children into monsters. The book is as sorrowful as it is informative.

Gaines, incidentally, was also the publisher of Mad Magazine, which he kept putting out (and is still published today). He got around the laws with that one by publishing it as a magazine (it's also interesting to note that at the height of this brouhaha was when Playboy magazine debuted). You can't keep Americans from getting their hands on stuff they want, no matter how some other people try to stop them.