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“The line dividing the comics' advocates and opponents was generational, rather than geographic. While many of the actions to curtail comics were attempts to protect the young, they were also efforts to protect the culture at large from the young. Encoded in much of the ranting about comic books and juvenile delinquency were fears not only of what comic readers might become, but of what they already were--that is, a generation of people developing their own interests and tastes, along with a determination to indulge them.”

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Book:Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book-Scare and How It Changed America
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“In its conclusion, the report argued, "The wholesale condemnation of all comics magazines is one of the worst mistakes of some of the critics. The fact is both sides are right. The books are not all bad, as the more extreme critics say; nor are all good, as some of their publishers and defenders content. Like all other creative products, they must be judged individually. And that is what most critics, parents, and public officials have failed to do." Still, the city council found a third of published comics to be "offensive, objectionable, and undesirable," and, on February 2, 1949, it appointed a board to monitor news dealers' compliance with a blacklist of titles.”

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Book:The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America
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“When the Associated Press picked up the story from local accounts, readers of The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and dozens of other papers around the country learned how, just three years after the Second World War, American citizens were burning books.”

Graphic NovelsBook BurningComic BooksMoral Panic
Book:The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America
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“All of our testimony from psychiatrists and children themselves show that it's very upsetting, that it has a bad moral effect, and that it is directly responsible for a substantial amount of juvenile delinquency and child crime." In fact, both the expert testimony and the documentary evidence submitted at the hearings varied significantly in their judgments, and the committee spoke with no children; it had set a policy of precluding the testimony of minors. The writer of the program, A. J. Fenady, had not seen a transcript of the hearings before preparing Coates's questions and "basically threw the guy some softballs," he said, because "[Kefauver] wanted to use this soapbox to run for president" in the 1956 election. "The comic-book scare was the big thing he had going for him," Fenady recalled, "and he knew how to use it.”

Graphic NovelsComic BooksMoral Panic
Book:The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America
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