Ten-Cent Plague HC
Description
Written by
"This is the revelatory, until now largely untold story of a lost world of the imagination--a world that existed for a few short years in the pulpy, brightly colored, boldly illustrated pages of little books sold for a dime at newsstands and candy counters across America.
In the years between the end of the World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium in the mid-1950s, the most popular form of American entertainment was the comic book. Created by outsiders from the tenements, comic books--garish, shameless, and often shocking--at once spoke to young people and served as a canvas for their creators' expressions of American ambition, and American crime, sex, and low life as well.
Naturally, comic books provided guardians of order and decency with a big target. No sooner had comic books become a phenomenon that they were beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and McCarthyish politicians. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned them in public bonfires. Cities passed measures to outlaw them. Congress took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers.
One such was Bill Gaines, proprietor of EC Comics. Gaines's feisty little empire was shattered by the crackdown, but his spirit was not, and his distinctly American brand of irreverence resurfaced with a crooked smile on its face in the pages of MAD magazine--a comeback whose ironies echo all the way down to the present day."
