Friday Favorites: May 9
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- May
- 9
Not so much a comic book fan — just a personal preference or lack thereof — so I can’t say I would have ordinarily chosen this book for myself. But that said, “The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America” by David Hajdu (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) is interesting beyond comic books. I am a supporter of free speech, so this newly published book on censorship is the topic for me this week. It seems to transcends its comic book topic to provide an important message about protecting free speech.
The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression is recommending a new book that tells how fears about the impact of comic books on children had an affect on the publication of that genre in the 1950s.
“The Ten Cent Plague” is by David Hajdu (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). At the ABFFE site you can click on a link and read an interview with the author. He has also written “Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn” and “Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina.”
“Hajdu’s book is a sobering reminder of what happens to artistic freedom when society turns to censorship to protect its children,” ABFFE President Chris Finan said. “His new book is an important contribution to the current debate over efforts to censor the Internet, video games and other media that appeal to the young.”
For an interesting review, check out a really neat bookblog, Bookslut.com
This entry was posted
on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 6:00 am by Barbara Nackman.
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A municipal reporter for The Journal News since 1997, 
I still have a handful of my comics salvaged. One if i remember was actually the story: Red Badge of Courage.
There was a time when they put literature in comic book form. I think its still done. I havent bought a comic book since they hit double digit pricing.