num_pages: 434
description: 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. 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. 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.
language: English
title: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America
publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux