David Hajdu - Censorship in the Comic Book Industry

Complete video at: fora.tv Author David Hajdu discusses 1950's-era self-censorship in the comic book industry. ----- "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America" with author David Hajdu. Comic books, not rock-and-roll, created the generation gap. (They also spawned juvenile delinquency, crime, sexual deviance, and things of such depravity that were we to name them, our note wouldn't get through your "adult content" filter.) Long before Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan from the waist up, long before Jerry Lee Lewis married his cousin, long before James Dean yelled "you're tearing me apart," teachers, politicians, priests and parents were lining up across from comic book publishers, writers, artists, and children at bonfires and Senate hearings decrying the evil that was The Ten-Cent Plague. In what is the third in an informal trilogy about American popular culture at mid-century, Hajdu (Lush Life, Positively Fourth Street) radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between "high" and "low" art - Cody's Books David Hajdu writes a monthly column for The New Republic on music and popular culture. He is a contributor to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair. Mr. Hajdu was the general editor of Entertainment Weekly from 1990 to 1999, editor-at-large for the New York Times Magazine Group from 1985 to 1990, and the editor-in-chief at ...