I enjoyed a few hours at the Texas Book Festival. Yesterday was such a beautiful, warm, calm day. Friendly looking families with kids milled through white tents filled with books or sat with snow cones on the capitol lawns. I bought one book because I liked its images and content. Its a tiny red and black book that a man wrote and designed about the passing of his dog. Memories about the dog are spread out in one sentence per page narrative. A black silhouette of the dog has been printed on the bottom corner of every page, but as you flip through the book, this silhouette moves off the page until it disappears. I think I’ll give the book to my mom who is still grieving the loss of our little pug Buda who died in the road recently.

The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and how it changed America

Talk given by David Hajdu. “Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.” says talk description. 

The title of this lecture attracted me more than it would have last year since I recently read Understanding Comics. I learned a part of history I never knew before. Apparently this part of history has been forgotten or left out in a lot of peoples memories. Neither of my parents had heard about the comic book scare in the 40s and 50s either. Although my dad recalls how much his mother disliked his reading comics and wonders now if that was the reason.

What I learned from this journalist/author lecturer who collected stories from 800 people for his book: 

Comic books were the #1 form of entertainment in the 50’s. American comics were a major export at this time. Comics were passed down from hand to hand and reread until they fell apart. This is part of the reason, comics from that era are hard to come by. The real reason comics of this time are rare is their mass burning.

Comics began by young people for young people. Those creating them were “outsiders” maybe because they were Jewish, female, Asian, Black, different in some way from the status quo so they found ways to express themselves in comics since magazines and publishers of the time wouldn’t hire them and posted help wanted ads that had in tiny letters at the bottom “A Christian Company” So a group of people created this new art form, trying to create meaningful work, trying to challenge the status quo. Comics had this unconventional, subversive, outsider sensibility that the status quo felt threatened by. They realized something defiant was going on and that children were the ones learning these new ways of thinking and values because they were the ones reading comics. At the time 99.5 % of children read comics. 

The video clip the author showed, which stated the severe harms of kids reading comic books, got many laughs because of how old-fashioned and aburd the arguments sound today especially compared to what kids have at their disposal now. Comic books were banned from Canada – no superman comics could cross the border! Comic books started being restricted and banned across America, condemned as “harmful to young people and the cause of violence and crime.” Comics were gathered up everywhere and burned and these public burnings lasted 10 years. The comic industry nearly died completely. It was later revived when the generation who were children during the scare grew up and some of the illustrators among them decided to continue the mission of people who started the genre. Its hard to believe that something like this happened at the beginning of my parent’s life time and has so quickly been lost from many people’s memories.