Weird Tales Of Crime, Horror... And Censorship!

In 1948, Americans were buying somewhere between 80 and 100 million comic books a month, generating about $72 million in revenue annually. If “mainstream” publishing was making more money, it was only because a hardcover novel cost 20 times more than a 10-cent issue of Crime Does Not Pay.

But money did not buy comic books respectability: comics publishers tended to be independent entrepreneurs operating on the fringes, their artists and writers largely drawn from segments of society—Jews, blacks, women—who found it difficult to get jobs in the WASPier, more prestigious companies. And comic books gloried in topics that other publishers wouldn’t touch: from romances featuring teenage lovers sneaking around behind their parents’ backs to lurid tales of sin, violence, adultery, crime, and horror. A lot of it was unrepentant trash, but for the kids (and plenty of older readers) who loved them, comics had a lowdown vitality that spoke to them in a way that nothing else in pop culture could equal.

But by 1956, the entire industry was almost dead. And, unlike EC Comics mascot The Crypt-Keeper, it wasn't in the mood to laugh about it.

The immediate culprit was one man: a crusading German-born psychiatrist named Fredric Wertham whose damning testimony at a televised 1954 Senate hearing investigating the link between so-called “crime comics” and juvenile delinquency led to massive public outrage and a call to either censor their content or ban them outright. Wertham’s name is still anathema to most comic-book fans—he’s the prude whose McCarthyist crusade put hundreds of great artists and writers out of work and forced comics companies to spend the next decade or more to publish insipid, sanitized comics in compliance with the Draconian “Comics Code Authority.” That is, if they didn’t go bankrupt first.

But as author David Hajdu points out in his engrossing new book The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, anti-comics sentiment had been brewing for more than a decade earlier. Mass burnings of comic-books had taken place in several American cities, and at least 50 municipalities had taken steps to keep the more extreme comics—and make no mistake: some of the books in question would make even Eli Roth blanch—out of the hands of children.

With The Ten-Cent Plague, Hajdu—the award-winning author of Lush Life (a biography of jazz legend Billy Strayhorn) and Positively 4th Street (about Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Richard and Mima Fariña, and the Greenwich Village folk scene of the ’50s and ’60s)—has provided the fullest account yet of the rise and near-collapse of the comics industry. Not only has he tracked down many of the artists whose careers were ruined by the anti-comics crackdown, many of whom had never been interviewed before about their experiences, but he also talks to comics collectors, who turn out to be the mirror opposite of the passive, intellectually stunted juveniles of Wertham’s imagination. The book is also a vivid piece of social history, capturing a moment in time when an entire generation of children began pulling away from their parents and developing a unique culture with its own irreverent tastes and values. It’s the story of the birth of youth culture—a culture that has evolved in ways that not even Hajdu whole-heartedly approves of.

David Hajdu spoke to me from his office at Columbia University in New York. Here’s our conversation.

Q: What drew you to this material? You dabbled in cartoons and illustrations when you were younger—was that part of the appeal? Or was it just that this was a story that you felt had not been fully told before?

David Hajdu: Yes. My background is as a journalist, so I’m conditioned to tell untold stories, or stories I can bring something new to. Now, when I first started poking around this subject area, I was unsure whether it would yield an article or a critical essay, or something larger. I really didn’t know until I was knee-deep in the research that there was so much here. In previous writing about comics and the culture of the ’50s, the most you’ll usually get is a couple of paragraphs here and there mentioning that there was some controversy about comics, and it’s usually depicted as the work of this zealot Fredric Wertham who stirred up a few crazies and reactionaries. But Wertham didn’t just come out of nowhere. The controversy actually started around 1940—it was not just a phenomenon of the 1950s—and it riveted all of North America.

Q: You conducted a lot of interviews with comics artists and writers for the book. I was wondering if you could talk about why that was so important for you, and whether it was difficult at all to get them to open up about their experiences in the comics industry. You get the feeling that a lot of them really clammed up about their comics work, especially in the wake of the Senate hearings, when saying you were a comics artist was like telling people you created child pornography for a living.

DH: Well, it was very important to me. Firstly, in the contemporary reports about the controversy, comics artists and writers weren’t interviewed. And even in the Senate hearings, no comic-book artists were asked to testify. That whole side of the war is scarcely represented at all! And secondly, a great many of the people who suffered most as a result of the clampdown on comics have never been interviewed at all. There are several artists and writers from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s who’ve since gone on to make appearances at comics conventions and so on, but they’re mostly people who came back into the field years later when it recovered. But there are all sorts of people who were driven out of work and never worked in comics again and sort of disappeared. Their stories are lost! So to get the story of the people who suffered most, I really needed to find the witnesses to the events and talk to them.

Q: Why weren’t the artists and writers asked to testify, anyway?

DH: That’s a great question. The reason, I think, can partly be tracked to Wertham’s rationale. In his book Seduction of the Innocent, he describes comics artists as jobbers; he actually has the nerve to say, “Nobody does crime comics by choice.” He depicts this Machiavellian, Faustian scenario where these sad, desperate people are forced into some kind of servitude, forced against their will to draw comics. And the precise opposite was true! Everyone I could find actually reveled in the freedom that comics provided, and they felt they were more welcome in comics than they would have been in other arenas like magazines or advertising. They believed in what they were doing!

Q: How legitimate do you think the fears of parents and teachers and authority figures were regarding these comics? I mean, some of them were pretty extreme. How much of the anti-comics sentiment was based on this dubious belief that comics caused juvenile delinquency, and how much of it was a gut-level feeling that a lot of this stuff was inappropriate for a 13-year-old to be looking at?

DH: I think those are both true. In a macro sense, what was happening was that comics were doing something that parents didn’t understand—they were expressing a sensibility that really rattled adults because it was so different from the frame of reference in which they grew up, this raucous, wild fixation on wrongdoing and bad behaviour, this cynicism toward authority. It was difficult for parents to come to terms with what they found on the pages when they finally decided to look. It all gets very thorny and hard to quantify definitively, but you also find kids changing and acting in a rabble-rousing way and adopting various modes of behaviour that were pathologized as “juvenile delinquency.” And parents blamed comics for a lot of that. That said, I have a son who’s about to turn five, and I would be uncomfortable with him seeing many of the comics that parents were outraged by in 1948. Free speech is one thing, but when young people are involved, I think being a parent carries the responsibility, the duty, to ensure their kids are exposed to the influences that serve them best. Now, that said, the issue of how kids are best served is a really complicated one. The presence of evil in comics isn’t by itself a bad thing. I mean, there’s evil in the Bible. It’s part of the reality of life, and I think there’s a risk in shielding kids from reality. Even in their gruesomeness and violence, comics provide a venue in which to work out issues of good and bad in their mind.

Q: It’s interesting how in the book, you frame a lot of the controversy as a battle over the right of kids to even have tastes and thoughts of their own.

DH: The key issue is an intellectual one: it’s the relative nature of aesthetic values. Which makes the book sound like Derrida or something, but there it is. The issue of taste is what got [EC Comics publisher] Bill Gaines in so much trouble when he testified at the Senate hearings and landed him on the front page the next day—he dared to defend these comics on the grounds of taste. And not just taste, but the right of young people to have their own taste, and by extension, the right to have a different set of social and aesthetic values from their parents, which boils down to being different people from their parents. And to a parent, that notion is terrifying! It suggests our own system of values is dubious or outmoded—which means we ourselves are out of date too.

Q: That account of Gaines’ disastrous testimony before the Senate, where he’s running on a tankful of Dexedrine, No-Doz, and Coca-Cola, is one of the most gripping passages in the book. Do you think there was anything Gaines could have done to have brought about a better outcome? Or was it a bad idea for him to have testified at all?

DH: Well, he was fairly lucid for most of the testimony and only floundered toward the end. I think he did the right thing by testifying, but he just didn’t stand a chance. One thing that’s very illuminating is that rock ’n’ roll came along just a couple of years later—why wasn’t rock ’n’ roll snuffed out the way comics were? Why weren’t rock ’n’ roll artists driven out of work? What’s the difference? Well, I think the differences are largely economic. There were no large companies publishing comics and not as much money going to the corporate power centres of American industry. It’s going to fringe operators—there was no equivalent of RCA or Columbia Records in comics. Which made these folks easy targets.

Q: So is there anything those of us in the present can learn from the comic-book scare? Is the uproar over violent videogames, for instance, just the same old story all over again, or is there something different about this new debate?

DH: You know, it’s very hard for me to answer that, because I’m a middle-aged person who probably doesn’t get the art of young people. I don’t like Grand Theft Auto, for instance. It really horrifies me. The idea of my five-year-old pulling the trigger in a videogame where you’re the serial killer is something I find deeply unnerving. I can’t see those ultraviolent horror films that are being made today, and if they’re the long-term outgrowth of a trend that started with the comic books of the ’40s and ’50s, that raises real questions for me—I don’t know what side I’d be on anymore.

Q: One of the artists you talk to, Al Williamson, says back then was “a bad time to be weird.” Is now a good time to be weird, do you think?

DH: [Laughs.] Maybe never better! [Pause.] But you know, we’re in this horrible war, with these unthinkable atrocities going on. I have a 24-year-old and a 21-year-old too, and when the images of Abu Ghraib came out, I was wondering why my kids in college weren’t marching in the streets. And then I realizes that they see that kind of thing all the time in entertainment. And you can’t help but think that as a culture, we’ve gotten inured and anesthetized to violence. I’m troubled by it. And if that makes me sound like a hypocrite, so be it. But what I tried to do in the book was explore all dimensions of the story and not be so one-sided about it. So there you go.