Name: The Ten-Cent Plague
ISBN: 9780374187675

David Hajdu

A vivid study of the lost world of comic books examines the influence of this pulpy, lavishly illustrated medium on the evolution of American popular culture in the wake of World War II and before the emergence of television as a mass medium, focusing on the battle against comic books by church groups, community elite, academics, and a right-wing Congress.

The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America

The Ten-Cent Plague

Jowanza Joseph

This book is just a bit too long and tries to drown the reader with facts rather than telling an interesting story. This is too bad because the content overall is pretty interesting. I wish I could say I enjoyed it, but what It came down to was just finding it to be really good information, like reading an academic paper or encyclopedia.

Dennis Jacob Rosenfeld

Examines the influence of comic books on the evolution of American popular culture in the years between World War II and the emergence of television, focusing on the battle against comic books by church groups, community elite, and a right-wing Congress.

Rjyan C Kidwell

Alejandra Brown

The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told -- until The Ten-Cent Plague. David Hajdu's remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority. In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created—in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress—only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine. When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how -- years before music -- comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers. The Ten-Cent Plague radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between "high" and "low" art. As he did with the lives of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington (in Lush Life) and Bob Dylan and his circle (in Positively 4th Street), Hajdu brings a place, a time, and a milieu unforgettably back to life.

The Ten-Cent Plague The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America

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