A Plague of Biblical Proportions

Louis Menand looks at the comic book’s contribution to Cold War culture:

By 1952, as David Hajdu reports in his vivid and engaging book “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $26), more than twenty publishers were putting out close to six hundred and fifty titles a month. Eighty to a hundred million comic books were sold every week; according to contemporary reports, the average issue was passed along to six or more readers. The math of the pass-alongs is a little dubious, but it seems plausible to say, as Hajdu does, that in the early nineteen-fifties comic books reached more people than magazines, radio, or television did. Most of those people were children.

By 1952, a third of all comic books were horror comics