Growing up I was an inveterate comic book reader. While other kids learned crafts or played sports, more often than not, I was reading comic books. One of the happiest moments of my youth was discovering a box of almost a hundred comic books at my grandmother’s house from when my father was a kid in the early 1960s. This discovery, along with the speculative bubble in comic book auction sales, prompted an interest in the history of comic books.

As I got older, some of my more worldly friends criticized comic books as having a peculiar and non-representative world view; of being sexist, misogynist, imperialist and racist. The few female and minority characters were seen as tokens created to offset a mainstream representation of an America stuck in the 1950s. The development of this particularly myopic world view forms the basis of David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague, which chronicles the events that led to the formation of the Comics Code Authority in 1955.

It appears that my friends were not the first ones to criticize comic books. According to Hajdu, the reading of comic books, from the creation of the Sunday cartoons in newspapers, to Famous Funnies, the first actual comic book, and beyond, is presented as a generational right of passage, and as such, continually ran afoul of various self-appointed watchdogs of youth morality.

Initially comic books were considered juvenile and low-class. As their subject matter progressed to more serious topics like crime, concerns were raised that criminal activity would spill out of the four-colour panels and into the activities of children. Even before undead monsters and sexual predators began to haunt their pages, the U.S. Congress was already investigating comics, and concerned citizens organized public burnings of corrupting titles like Superman, Wonder Woman and Crime Does Not Pay.

While Hajdu’s book is an enlightening and entertaining account of the early history of American comic books, it’s somewhat one-sided. Steadfastly collecting interviews with many of the key players from within the so-called golden age of comics, Hajdu draws light to a period whose cultural history has literally been burned from memory, however, we are rarely presented with more than press clippings from the antagonists. Part of Hajdu’s thesis is that comic books, or their persecution, somehow changed America. Failing to do justice to the other side undermines his argument.

The other major drawback is that Hajdu ends his book by examining the creation of the Comics Code Authority (CCA) and the decimation of the industry’s ranks. Hajdu estimates that 800 artists, writers and editors lost their jobs and numerous publications went bankrupt. Interviews suggest that sending comic books to a censorship board prior to publication severely curtailed the types of stories and images presented in the books, but Hajdu presents little in the way of follow up. After hearing so much about popular perceptions that the comic book free-for-all indulgence in sex, horror and crime stories made a significant contribution to juvenile delinquency rates, there is no mention of what impact the CCA actually had.