In an age of video-game force and the nearly-anything-goes Internet. it’s informative to read that one time upon a clip. non that long ago. Congress was concerned about what was widely viewed as a serious threat to American young person: amusing books. David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague is both cultural history and prophylactic narrative about censoring. It’s a well-written. elaborate expression at how amusing books became a phenomenon in the early 1950s and how governments cracked down on the most popular signifier of amusement in America. At the clip. cartoon strips were selling more than 80 million transcripts a hebdomad. But unlike films and the new Television industry. they were unregulated — at least for a piece. Their content was switching from the baronial feats of superheroes to edgier and darker stuff: narratives of offense. frailty. lecherousness and horror.

Congress held televised hearings on what was described as the nexus between cartoon strips and juvenile delinquency. Bill Gaines. publishing house of EC Comics. was high on pep pills as he haplessly tried to explicate how an illustration of a adult male keeping a cut off caput could be in “good gustatory sensation. ” States and metropoliss passed Torahs to censor or restrict gross revenues. Schools urged pupils to convey their cartoon strips to school to be burned in celebratory balefires. In 1954. comic-book publishing houses adopted a codification that banned the words “terror” and “horror” and declared that “policemen. Judgess. authorities functionaries and well-thought-of establishments shall ne’er be presented in such a manner as to make discourtesy for established authorization. ”

The writer. a critic for The New Republic. is sympathetic to the creative persons and authors caught up in “the craze over amusing books. ” His research is impressive. His appendix lists 15 pages of names of those “who ne’er once more worked in cartoon strips after the purging of the fiftiess. ” Gaines. who had such a black clip at the congressional hearings. had the last laugh. To avoid censoring of the codification. he converted one of his cartoon strips into a magazine format. Mad became the most popular and satirical youth magazine of the ’60s and ’70s. ( degree Celsius ) USA TODAY. 2008

Beginning: USA Today. MAR 20. 2008
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