Sawgrass Village, a tidy development about twenty-five miles east of Jacksonville, Florida, is named for the wild marsh greenery that its turf lawns displaced. Michelle Heimerman/Courtesy Farrar, Straus and Giroux He is the author of Lush Life, Positively 4th Street and, most recently, The Ten-Cent Plague. "The comic-book war was one of the first and hardest-fought conflicts between young people and their parents in America," Hajdu writes, "and it seems clear, too, now, that it was worth the fight."ĭavid Hajdu is a critic for The New Republic and a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Ten-Cent Plague details how the controversy nearly killed the comic business but also played a key role in defining postwar pop culture. Hajdu says those disputes - which included book burnings and congressional hearings - were about much more than cartoons. In The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America, David Hajdu chronicles what he calls "a forgotten chapter in the history of the culture wars" - the heated controversy over comics. It wasn't long before parents took notice. Inspired by the same influences driving pulp fiction and film noir, graphic novels took on grittier, more adult narratives - and naturally were a hit with young readers. Do you remember the 1950s comic-book debates?Īfter World War II, the squeaky-clean comic-book superheroes of the 1940s were joined on newsstand shelves by darker, edgier anti-heroes and -heroines.
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