Tuesday, May 13, 2008
In a last-ditch effort to save their industry, comic book publishers formed a trade organization, the Comics Magazine Association of America, and a code that Hajdu describes as "a monument to self-imposed repression and prudery." A few, including Gaines, decided they couldn't produce any comics of worth or commercial appeal under the code, but without the CMAA's seal of approval, renegade comic books wouldn't get picked up by distributors and newsstand proprietors who'd been spooked by the controversy. Many of the artists and writers abandoned creative professions entirely to work as security guards and mailmen, and Gaines discontinued every title he put out -- except Mad, which he published as a magazine (thereby eluding CMAA jurisdiction).
The lineaments of this story are fairly familiar, despite Hajdu's insistence in the introduction to "The Ten-Cent Plague" that it has become "a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the culture wars." A fresher observation is that comics, not rock 'n' roll, were an intimation of the "postwar sensibility" to come, an outlook that was "a raucous and cynical one, inured to violence and absorbed with sex, skeptical of authority, and frozen in childhood." Mad magazine, full of bratty parodies of the products of mainstream culture, has often been cited as the first inkling of that sensibility, and Mad was decidedly born out of the comic book scare. Hajdu illustrates the rebellion simmering within young comics fans with quotes from people who were pressured into participating in comic book burnings as children. "I thought about that bonfire and all those comics and it made me sick," one source told him. "I started to get angry ... and went out and bought myself some comic books."
What "The Ten-Cent Plague" has over any previous treatment of the subject is an impressive depth of research. The disgruntled comics reader quoted above is far from the only ordinary person Hajdu appears to have tracked down from a name in a yellowing newspaper clipping. (He even interviewed the great African-American photographer Gordon Parks, who took Wertham's author photo.) As a story of intergenerational paranoia and censorious media-fueled panic, the comic book scare was a signal moment in postwar American history, the grammar school version of the McCarthy hearings. Yet for all the exhaustive attention Hajdu trains on the subject, he never quite comes to terms with some major questions.
Granted, the anti-comics crusade was hysterical, an out-of-proportion reaction to a manufactured crisis in "juvenile delinquency." (Like the alarmism about child abductions a few years ago, this was largely a matter of people regarding sensational media reports of isolated incidents as indicative of a wider social trend.) The politicians who ran the hearings were grandstanding, Wertham was a peculiar obsessive, and the ensuing crackdown clearly violated the First Amendment in many instances. Still, to a certain extent, the comic book industry dug its own grave. The pivotal moment in Gaines' testimony came when the committee chairman held up a copy of "Crime SuspenStories," featuring a huge close-up of, in Hajdu's words, "the severed head of an attractive blond woman, dangling by the hair in the grip of her killer," with a bloody ax just behind it.
Even if he hadn't been collapsing from exhaustion, it's difficult to see how Gaines could have defended this and other comic vignettes -- a baseball game played with dismembered body parts and a woman roasting her husband's corpse on the backyard grill -- as appropriate for children. Still, Hajdu waxes indignant that, as the panic gathered force, "adults did not seem prepared to accept the average young person's capacity for independent thought and discrimination." What he seems unable to acknowledge is that overriding a kid's judgment is part of a parent's job, up to a point. Otherwise, we'd all have grown up on a diet of candy and pizza.
Where that point comes is perhaps the most difficult question to answer. Within the comics industry, people did quarrel over content; EC's longtime business manager quit because he objected to some of what they published. Hajdu himself admits that "if 'Seduction of the Innocent' encouraged some parents to keep copies of Stanley P. Morse's 'Weird Chills' out of third-graders' hands, Wertham performed a worthy service." Some of the era's comic books were a kind of art, but others were produced with the attitude best epitomized by Morse, who once said, "No one complained, so we gave the people what they wanted until they started complaining about it." When a senator at the committee hearings protested that comic book publishers "do not seem to care what they do or what they purvey or what they dish out to these youngsters as long as it sells and brings in the money," he was -- at least partly -- right.
According to Hajdu, Gaines and his committed writers and artists believed their readers to be in their mid- to late teens, but that doesn't mean they did anything to help parents keep 7-year-olds away from their more extreme books. The industry only instituted its code once it was backed into a corner, and then it went predictably overboard. Gaines was pressured to change a science fiction parable about racial discrimination because the code's administrator declared, nonsensically, "You can't have a Negro."
The clash between the comic book publishers and the anti-comics campaigners was a folie à deux, with neither side showing much willingness to consider the larger consequences of its actions. Comics were an easy target for morals crusaders because their constituency -- children and teenagers -- couldn't stand up for themselves and their rights. On the other hand, some comics publishers really had abused the naive faith of American parents who assumed that their fellow citizens wouldn't seek profits by introducing their kids to dismemberment and cannibalism behind their backs. If the greater wrong lies with the censors, both sides sought advantage in the fact that nobody took children's culture seriously.
Hajdu, however, is determined to paint comic book publishers as martyrs (if sometimes sleazy ones) and their foes as crazed, ignorant, snobby prudes. Idealizing the underdog in this case is essential to the heroic narrative embedded in "The Ten-Cent Plague," to its celebration of the comics as a defiant voice in a conformist 1950s society that reflexively kowtowed to authority and institutions. The problem, as the counterculture would eventually demonstrate, is that while authority isn't always right, it isn't always wrong, either. Knee-jerk rebellion can be as stupid as knee-jerk obedience. Just think how differently the sorry tale of the great comic book scare would have turned out if everyone involved had been a little more grown-up.
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