The Ten-Cent Plague
David Hajdu
The Ten-Cent Plague:
The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
by David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$26.00 List Price
IN THE LATE ’40S AND EARLY ’50S, there was no more vibrant part of the publishing industry than the lowly dime-store comic, churned out by an army of boilerplate writers, illustrators, and editors in New York for a rapturously devoted young audience. That is, until a cadre of youth groups and civic authorities targeted these publications as gateway reading to moral depravity. After Mad-magazine founder Bill Gaines foundered
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