But, if you want to understand what was really going on in the mad, mad, mad world of the 1950's you should read David Hajdu's hilarious and harrowing account of The Great Comic Book Scare. “Who knew? The right was focused on the Red Menace and the left on the Red Scare. “David Hajdu, who perfectly detailed the Dylan-era Greenwhich Village scene in Positively 4th Street, does the same for the birth and near death (McCarthyism!) of comic books in The Ten-Cent Plague.” -GQ “A vivid and engaging book.” -Louis Menand, The New Yorker 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 radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between "high" and "low" art. Congress took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. 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. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how - years before music - comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. 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. 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. David Hajdu's remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority. The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told - until The Ten-Cent Plague.
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