Arts & Ammo

Comic-Book Wars

Stefan Kanfer reviews David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America in City Journal.

In the mid 1950s, comic books became the social villain. Psychiatrist Frederick Wertham mounted a crusade, arguing that comic books presented children with images of violence, racism, and sexism, and incited them to crime and anti-social behavior. The result was an industry Comics Code Authority. The Code turned the comics bland and reduced the titles available dramatically.

The publisher of Educational Comics—which specialized in horror and suspense titles—wrote a sarcastic editorial: “We give up. WE HAVE HAD IT! Naturally, with comic-book censorship now a fact, we at EC look forward to an immediate drop in the crime and juvenile delinquency rate in the United States. We trust there will be fewer robberies, fewer murders and fewer rapes!”

The coarsening of culture, of course, continued.

Hajdu believes that “the comic-book war was one of the first and hardest-fought conflicts between young people and their parents in America, and it seems clear, too, now, that it was worth the fight.” But those who look at the current fare in films, TV, the Internet, and newsstands might wonder what was gained in the victory. The history of comics reveals, wittingly or otherwise, how much we have lost. The Ten-Cent Plague does, too.

May 9th, 2008 Posted by Fitzroy | Literature | no comments