The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America è un libro che analizza il periodo in cui, negli USA, il fumetto venne attaccato da ogni parte (sacerdoti e psicanalisti, politici e medici...), considerato fonte di (quasi) ogni male e della (supposta) disastrosa depravazione dei bambini americani. Niente da ridere, insomma, altro che "comics"! David Hajdu, l'autore, non si limita a trattare il periodo reso famoso dal libro dello psicologo Wertham (Seduction of the Innocent, 1954), ma arriva fino al 1906, quando, a essere accusata di crimini contro la società fu la striscia Katzenjammer Kids (Bibì e Bibò e il Capitan Cocoricò, sul Corriere dei Piccoli).

 "... Gaines' congressional appearance is one of the climactic moments in "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America," David Hajdu's history of the very serious attack on funny books. Here, Hajdu doggedly documents a long national saga of comic creators testing the limits of content while facing down an ever-changing bonfire brigade. That brigade was made up, at varying times, of politicians, lawmen, preachers, medical minds and academics. Sometimes, their regulatory bids recalled the Hays Code; at others, it was a bottled-up version of McCarthyism. Most of all, the hysteria over comics foreshadowed the looming rock 'n' roll era; like Elvis and his pelvis, the funny books encoded adult titillations in packages sold to a young audience. "The Ten-Cent Plague" traces the shrill sound of alarm all the way back to 1906, when Ralph Bergengren harrumphed in the Atlantic Monthly that the comic strip "Katzenjammer Kids" and its four-color ilk were committing multiple crimes against society. "Respect for property," he wrote, "respect for parents, for law, for decency, for truth, for beauty, for kindliness, for dignity, or for honor are killed, without mercy." That was almost half a century before Gaines and his gleeful crew sharpened up their axes. The most memorable crusades against comics, though, took place in the 1940s and 1950s as part of a response to surging "juvenile delinquency," a term Hajdu smartly deconstructs. In his view, it's an umbrella label, "a way to define a range of phenomena involving young people that, to the prevailing adult authorities, seemed to represent a falling short, a delinquency, in youthful behavior. It defined by negation: ..." Full article: LosAngelesTimes.

Articolo di afnews (se non altrimenti indicato) - Domenica, 23/3/2008
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