In the New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews "THE TEN-CENT PLAGUE The
Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America."
> "It was a bad time to be weird," one
> artist says of 1953. By then,
> governmental witch hunting was on the
> rise, and public fears of juvenile
> delinquency were easily fanned. While
> Mr. Hajdu does not defend the comics'
> reckless extremes, he regards some of
> them as more worthy of psychiatric
> examination than punishment. And he
> positions the drive to clean up comics
> as a response to larger fears. "There
> was no mistaking the commonality of
> what was starting to happen in comic
> books and what was going on in the
> rest of the world," he quotes the
> comic book editor Frank Bourgholtzer
> as saying. But on a scale of postwar
> public panic attacks, he places this
> one somewhere below the Red scare and
> above U.F.O.s.
> "The Ten-Cent Plague" examines the
> early power of television to fan these
> flames as Senate subcommittee
> hearings, led by Senator Estes
> Kefauver, were conflated in the public
> consciousness with the Kefauver
> hearings on organized crime. At the
> center of this crisis was Bill Gaines,
> the publisher whose EC empire was
> crushed by the specter of censor****p
> after his testimony about a drawing of
> a woman's severed head helped
> crystallize the debate.
> Yet he went on to have the last laugh.
> Horror and terror had been among Mr.
> Gaines's staples, but the use of those
> words in titles was banned outright in
> 1954; New York State added "crime" to
> the list in 1955. However, Mr. Gaines
> had a humor comic book, and to escape
> regulation he decided to call it a
> magazine. That magazine, Mad, went on
> to skewer any target it chose with
> happy impunity.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/10/books/10masl.html
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