The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu

Some of my favorite comic books are the horror anthology comics published by EC Comics in the 1950's. This book focuses on that era of comics and specifically on how a wave of hysteria built up to the point that government forces pushed many of the publishers, writers out of the business for good.

Although the two are probably inextricable, I was more interested in the history of the comics from that era than I was in the story of their downfall. David Hajdu, in a writing style that can best be described as "dry," chooses to emphasise the latter, in exhaustive detail.

While the book was interesting, it was also, at times, a bit tedious and therefore took me a very long time to get through. I found it to be almost textbook like in it's approach. All in all, not a terrible book and possibly of great interest to those looking to learn more about 1950's comic books and their place in our culture. It just wasn't quite the book I set out to read.