In The Ten Cent Plague: The Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America, David Hajdu suggests that the Frederic Wertham-inspired Senate hearings and local anti-comics censorship laws of the fifties were a witch-hunt that destroyed comics as a mass medium. I think he gets much closer to showing the first part of his theory but whiffs on the second.

Hajdu fetchingly recreates the New York centric world of the comic book. This has certainly been done before, most recently in Gerard Jones' Men of Tomorrow, but where Hajdu excels is in an emphasis on the industry’s underbelly. For the most part, he bypasses familiar companies like DC/National and Marvel/Timely to concentrate on lesser known creators and titles such as Charles Biro's over the top Crime Does Not Pay. The book is worth reading for this alone.

In the mid to late forties, comic book publishers shifted to new genres, romance and more dangerously, crime and horror. Through detailed interviews with writers and artists, Hajdu gets at the sense in which comics of the time were like piecework in the garment industry (and some of the creators make this comparison explicit).

The switch to a new genre was carried out as quickly and effortlessly as a tailor might change the hem on a skirt, in search of greater sales, a publisher would just switch a book's title and genre to avoid paying the postal rate to register a completely new publication.

Just like in the garment industry, comics were open to anyone who could do competent work, regardless of gender, race, or ethnicity. A strong subtext in the book is the distinction Hajdu attempts to set up between this diverse mix of creators and the largely white and male politicians and local religious leaders trying to ban or regulate comics.

However, he does not offer anything to suggest that the groups complaining about the comics' content ever actually made an issue of the creators' backgrounds.

Another strength of Ten Cent Plague is that Hajdu gives a face to the protesting groups. Normally, Wertham and the others are simply portrayed as sinister forces trying to destroy what they don't understand.

Clearly, Hajdu has no sympathy for their position (though at one point he offers that some of the EC comics were pretty raw) but he interviewed people who were involved in comics burnings when they were children and he explores the process local parents and groups went through to establish review boards or ban comic altogether in their cities.

The book is well served by having gone beyond Seduction of the Innocent to offer a more nuanced view of the local and national shoals the comics publishers were having to navigate.

In the end, I think Hajdu ascribes too much of the fall of comics to the public climate against their content and not enough to the elephant in the room, television. The end of comics as a true mass medium dovetails nicely with the rise of television. And television was beginning to cater to a newly forming youth culture just as comics were.

Even though it pains me to suggest that Soupy Sales might have more to do with modern American culture than Will Eisner or Bernie Krigstein, I suspect that it is true.