The ten cent plague the.., p.1
The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed Amer, page 1
For Jake, Torie, and Nate
Table of Contents
Title Page
Prologue
1. - Society Iss Nix
2. - It Was Work
3. - Crime Pays
4. - Youth in Crisis
5. - Puddles of Blood
6. - Then Let Us Commit Them
7. - Woofer and Tweeter
8. - Love … LOVE … LOVE!!
9. - New Trend
10. - Humor in a Jugular Vein
11. - Panic
12. - The Triumph of Dr. Payn
13. - What Are We Afraid Of?
14. - We’ve Had It!
15. - Murphy’s Law
16. - Out of the Frying Pan and into the Soup
Epilogue
Praise for The Ten-Cent Plague, A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2008
Also by David Hajdu
About the Author
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Illustration Credits
Copyright Page
Prologue
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. It has 1,327 houses, each of them pale gray on the outside. On the inside, the one at 133 Lake Julia Drive is a dream shrine—a temple not to the past, like many other homes of retirees, but to a life imagined and denied. All the walls in its eight rooms, as well as the halls, are covered with framed paintings by Janice Valleau Winkleman, who moved there from Pittsburgh with her husband, Ed, in 1982, when he ended his four-decade career in sales (first, chemicals, then steel products). She had been painting almost every day for nearly thirty years. Having shown artistic talent at an early age, she had taken some formal training in fine art and illustration, and, at age nineteen, she began working professionally, drawing for Quality Comics in Manhattan. Then, one evening eleven years later, she came home from work and never went back.
For more than fifty years after that, Winkleman made no mention of the fact that she had had artwork prominently published as Janice Valleau. Her daughter Ellen grew up reading comic books without knowing that her mother had once helped create them.
In 2004, the Winklemans’ living room held seventy-four paintings—vigorous watercolor seascapes with violent waves, rendered in heavy blues and blacks; an acrylic of two seagulls suspended in flight, positioned upright in a golden-brown sky and surrounded by other gulls darting about them in every direction; watercolor after watercolor of old sailing ships, moldering in dry dock; a few abstracts of angular shapes and patterns done in pastel; portraits of exotic, alluring young women, one of them topless, with her face either unfinished or painted over. The images—at once lovely and tortured, all skillfully done but madly varied—could occupy a graduate art student or a psychoanalyst for some time.
At age eighty-one, Winkleman was a fragile woman, weakened by age and illness, though she still painted when she felt up to it, usually one or two days each week. “I like art—it’s important to me,” she said in a small but firm voice. Her eyes were bright behind grand, squarish glasses that covered most of her face. She sat straight-backed in a thin-cushioned metal chair that went with the desk in a half-room that also had her easel and taboret, a few boxes of art supplies, and a tea set. Her hands formed a teepee on her lap. She wore a pressed linen house dress and well-used tennis shoes, and she kept her legs crossed tightly with her calves angled back under the chair, as if to hide the shoes. Hanging in a frame on the wall to her right was the original pen-and-ink art to the first page of a Blackhawk comic-book story drawn by one of her old studio mates, Reed Crandall. In the days when they were working together, Winkleman had sneaked the page home in her portfolio, because she admired Crandall’s dynamic compositions and sure line.
“I wanted to be a magazine illustrator, but I loved comics, too,” she said, pointing her teepee toward the Blackhawk page. “I would have been happy being in any kind of art at all.”
Why, then, had she stopped working professionally half a century earlier? The paintings all over her house show that Winkleman had the skill and the versatility to have done commercial illustration. She had the experience in comics and the affection for the medium to have continued in that field. With the imagination she applied to some of her canvases, she might even have pursued fine art professionally. Why not?
“My God,” she said. She separated her hands and slapped them on her lap, then slowly brought them back together. “I couldn’t go back out there—I was scared to death. Don’t you know what they did to us?”
In the mid-1940s, when Janice Valleau was thriving as an artist for Quality Comics, the comic book was the most popular form of entertainment in America. Comics were selling between eighty million and a hundred million copies every week, with a typical issue passed along or traded to six to ten readers, thereby reaching more people than movies, television, radio, or magazines for adults. By 1952, more than twenty publishers were producing nearly 650 comics titles per month, employing well over a thousand artists, writers, editors, letterers, and others—among them women such as Valleau, as well as untold members of racial, ethnic, and social minorities who turned to comics because they thought of themselves or their ideas as unwelcome in more reputable spheres of publishing and entertainment.
Created by outsiders of various sorts, comics gave voice to their makers’ fantasies and discontent in the brash vernacular of cartoon drawings and word balloons, and they spoke with special cogency to young people who felt like outsiders in a world geared for and run by adults. In the forties, after all, the idea of youth culture as it would later be known—as a vast socioeconomic system comprising modes of behavior and styles of dress, music, and literature intended primarily to express independence from the status quo—had not yet formed; childhood and young adulthood were generally considered states of subadulthood, phases of training to enter the orthodoxy. Comic books were radical among the books of their day for being written, drawn, priced, and marketed primarily for and directly to kids, as well as for asserting a sensibility anathema to grown-ups.
Most adults never paid much mind until the comics—and the kids reading them—began to change.
During the early postwar years, comic books shifted in tone and content. Fed by the same streams as pulp fiction and film noir, many of the titles most prominent in the late forties and early fifties told lurid stories of crime, vice, lust, and horror, rather than noble tales of costumed heroes and heroines such as Superman, Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman, whose exploits had initially established the comics genre in the late thirties and early forties. These unprecedented dark comics sprouted from cracks in the back corners of the cultural terrain and grew wild. Unlike the movies and the broadcast media, comic books had no effective monitoring or regulatory mechanism—no powerful self-censoring body like the film industry’s Hays Office, no government authority like the FCC imposing content standards. Uninhibited, shameless, frequently garish and crude, often shocking, and sometimes excessive, these crime, horror, and romance comics provided young people of the early postwar years with a means of defying and escaping the mainstream culture of the time, while providing the guardians of that culture an enormous, taunting, close-range target. The world of comics became a battleground in a war between two generations, delineating two eras in American pop-culture history.
“Comic books are definitely harmful to impressionable people, and most young people are impressionable,” said the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, author of an incendiary tract, Seduction of the Innocent, which indicted comics as a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. “I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.
“The time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy stores.”
Churches and community groups raged and organized campaigns against comic books. Young people acted out mock trials of comics characters. Schools held public burnings of comics, and students threw thousands of the books into the bonfires; at more than one conflagration, children marched around the flames reciting incantations denouncing comics. Headlines in newspapers and magazines around the country warned readers: “Depravity for Children—Ten Cents a Copy!” “Horror in the Nursery,” “The Curse of the Comic Books.” The offices of one of the most adventurous and scandalous publishers, EC Comics, were raided by the New York City police. More than a hundred acts of legislation were introduced on the state and municipal levels to ban or limit the sale of comics: Scores of titles were outlawed in New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and other states, and ordinances to regulate comics were passed in dozens of cities. Soon, Congress took action with a set of sensational, televised hearings that nearly destroyed the comic-book business. Like Janice Valleau, the majority of working comics artists, writers, and editors—more than eight hundred people—lost their jobs. A great many of them would never be published again.
Through the near death of comic books and the end of many of their makers’ creative lives, postwar popular culture was born.
Page-one news as it occurred, the story of the comics controversy is a largely forgotten chapter in the history of the culture wars and one that defies now-common notions about the evolution of twentieth-century popu
It is clear now that the hysteria over comic books was always about many things other than cartoons: about class and money and taste; about traditions and religions and biases rooted in time and place; about presidential politics; about the influence of a new medium called television; and about how art forms, as well as people, grow up. The comic-book war was one of the first and hardest-fought conflicts between young people and their parents in America, and it seems clear, too, now, that it was worth the fight.
1.
Society Iss Nix
The first mission of the funny pages was to convoke the lower classes. Near the end of the nineteenth century, decades before the rise of comic books, more than thirty daily newspapers were competing for the allegiance of New York’s reading public, and publisher Joseph Pulitzer decided to experiment with his populist New York World to increase its appeal to the public that did not read, at least not English. He purchased one of the few printing presses capable of mass-producing full-color pictures on newsprint and introduced the Sunday color supplement: a four-page, seventeen-by-twenty-three-inch carnival of illustrated stories on ostensibly exotic and titillating subjects (Paris! Ballerinas!), political cartoons, and what quickly became America’s first comics sensation and licensing bonanza, a cartoon series published as Hogan’s Alley but popularly known by the nickname of its leading character, a bald little boy in a yellow nightshirt. Written and drawn by Richard Felton Outcault, a former technical illustrator, “The Yellow Kid” was set in the gutters of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and depicted the rowdy antics of a gang of young scruffs. The Kid himself, whom Outcault and no one else called Mickey Dugan, was a crude but strangely endearing caricature of the immigrant poor—barefoot, ugly, inarticulate, concerned only with base pleasures, and disposed to violence. He rarely spoke, and then did so in a marginally intelligible pidgin jumble of ethnic clichés: “De phonograph is a great invention—nit! I don’t think—wait till I git dat foolish bird hom. I wont do a ting te him well say!” His pals, much the same, were all vulgar stereotypes: oil-smeared Italians throwing tomatoes; Negroes with gum-bubble lips, snoozing or cowering in fear; scowling Middle Easterners in fezzes, waving scimitars—comrades in egalitarian minstrelsy. Some scenes included a goat who fit companionably with the kids. Apart from occasional adult trespassers such as cops or dogcatchers, tokens of civil order who would be duly subjected to horrific abuse, the residents of Hogan’s Alley were juveniles delinquent in many ways.
Within a decade, the popularity of the Yellow Kid led to the creation of dozens of newspaper cartoons and strips, including a duplicate Kid in the New York Journal when William Randolph Hearst bought the paper, a color press of his own, and most of Pulitzer’s staff, including Outcault and his feature. (The World continued to publish Hogan’s Alley with the Yellow Kid and his crew drawn by another artist, to the confusion of both papers’ readers and the enrichment of their attorneys.) The best of the strips lingered around the Lower East Side: Happy Hooligan, which followed a gleeful lout in his travails with the law, and the Katzenjammer Kids, in which a pair of immigrant German twins, Hans and Fritz, incited havoc in all quarters of society. As one of their favorite victims, “der Inspector,” noted: “Society iss nix” in the Katzenjammers’ hands. (This time, Hearst commissioned an artist on his staff, Rudolph Dirks, to create a strip on the model of Max und Moritz, a series of illustrated stories published in Germany, and the artist came up with the Katzenjammers, Hans and Fritz; in time, Dirks jumped over to Pulitzer with the Kids, and Hearst hired a mimic to continue the strip anyway, resulting again in look-alike comics with the same characters, done by different artists for two papers.) Happy Hooligan was essentially the Yellow Kid with clothes on, a few years older and more delinquent; Hans and Fritz were the Kid doubled and made more juvenile.
In their earthiness, their skepticism toward authority, and the delight they took in freedom, early newspaper comics spoke to and of the swelling immigrant populations in New York and other cities where comics spread, primarily through syndication (although locally made cartoons appeared in papers everywhere). The funnies were theirs, made for them and about them. Unlike movements in the fine arts that crossed class lines to evoke the lives of working people, newspaper comics were proletarian in a contained, inclusive way. They did not draw upon alleys like Hogan’s as a resource for refined expression, as Toulouse-Lautrec had employed the Moulin Rouge, nor did they use Hooligan’s clashes with the law for pedagogy to expose the powerful to the plight of the underclass, as John Steinbeck would utilize Cannery Row. The comics offered their audience a parodic look at itself, rendered in the vernacular of caricature and nonsense language. The mockery in comics was familial—intimate, knowing, affectionate, and merciless.
Comic strips were just beginning to sprout when some protective citizens noticed this unclassified species from Lower Manhattan and set out to uproot it. Articles censuring the various hooligans in the Sunday supplements began appearing in national magazines—that is, in a stratum of publishing then commonly regarded as more responsible than the mass-circulation newspapers; after all, unbridled sensationalism made Hearst and, to a lesser degree, Pulitzer, as notorious as the Yellow Kid with whom their brand of journalism would be associated. In a snorting critique published in the August 1906 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Ralph Bergengren called the supplements “humor prepared and printed for the extremely dull” and “a thing of national shame and degradation.” Chastising cartoons such as the Katzenjammer Kids for their vulgarity and crude draftsmanship, Bergengren ranted, “Respect for property, respect for parents, for law, for decency, for truth, for beauty, for kindliness, for dignity, or for honor, are killed, without mercy … Lunacy could go no farther than this pandemonium of undisguised coarseness and brutality …”
The criticism echoed already familiar charges against the dime novels of the late nineteenth century, which had delivered short, readable doses of blood and thunder to a working-class readership, thereby imperiling Victorian propriety. Comic strips essentially supplanted the dime novels and, in their accessibility to nonreaders in the immigrant population, surpassed the books in popularity. To watchdogs of American esteem in the early post-Victorian years, the earthy and raucous pages of the Sunday funnies threatened to devalue the United States’ emerging status as a civilized world power. Magazine articles derided comic strips as infantile, brutal, unsophisticated, and subliterate; and the funnies were all that, though by design—a possibility lost to critics applying the standards of other forms of art and literature created for one class to a new form invented for another class. Indeed, much of the early criticism of newspaper comics condemned them as lower-class, as if that status alone were cause for condemnation. Even the charge of juvenilia was entwined with class bias in a day when people of low social rank, like those of color, were often conflated with children.
Ladies’ Home Journal, in an article titled “A Crime Against American Children,” published in January 1909, tore the Sunday supplements apart for undermining literacy and glorifying lawlessness and savagery:
Are we parents criminally negligent of our children, or is it that we have not put our minds on the subject of continuing to allow them to be injured by the inane and vulgar “comic” supplement of the Sunday newspaper? One thing is certain: we are permitting to go on under our very noses and in our own homes an extraordinary stupidity, and an influence for repulsive and often depraving vulgarity so colossal that it is rapidly taking on the dimensions of nothing short of a national crime against our children.
Other magazines, including The Nation and Good Housekeeping, found the Sunday supplements most offensive because they were published on Sunday, the Christian Sabbath. When Hearst introduced the color section of the Journal, he promoted it as “eight pages of polychromatic effulgence that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe!” How could Sunday school compete with the thing that topped the rainbow? The supplements transformed Sunday in millions of American homes, Christian and otherwise, and not only for children. At a time when the newspapers were not only the primary form of mass communication but the only form (notwithstanding the mail) in many households, the leaping distance from gray sheets of type, dotted with tiny line drawings, to pages filled with bold colors was a vast one greatened by the sordid, anarchic content of those pages. If Pulitzer and Hearst could not steal the day from the God of Christ, they certainly made it hard for His people to keep holy.
