All In Color For A Dime … Or A Click
January 11th, 2009
“The Ten-Cent Plague” is David Hajdu’s excellent book about “the great comic book scare and how it changed America.” It’s a must-read if you have any interest at all in American pop culture in general or the history of comic books in particular. Or if you enjoyed Michael Chabon’s superlative The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.
Hajdu’s book details comic book bonfires, political posturing and the public silliness bordering on hysteria that attempted to connect comics and juvenile deliquency. It’s not a phenomenon unique to the 1950s: Think about how videogames are often blamed for crime and you’ll see that everything old is new again.
If the subject holds any interest for you — well, brace yourself. Have I got a site for you: Check out Golden Age Comics, the self-proclaimed “#1 site for downloading free copyright-free Golden Age comics.”
Want to see some of the crime, horror and love comics that led to Senate hearings and the creation of the Comics Code Authority in 1954? Or Golden Age work by noted artists like Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Frank Frazetta, Matt Baker, Gill Fox and others? There are about 5,000 or so comics available at the click of a mouse.
What may be most interesting about the site, though, are the miscellaneous comics that do more than provide a few minutes of genre entertainment: They provide a sharper look at cultural attitudes of the day.
Check out titles like “All-Negro Comics,” published in 1947 (publisher Orrin C. Evans’ editorial statement on the inside front cover is a fascinating read). Or “Picture News,” sort of a comic book version of the movie newsreels (one story in the March 1946 issue is titled, “Frank Sinatra Chokes Racial Bigotry at the Grass Roots”).
And, of course, there are duck ‘n’ cover comics with titles like “The H-Bomb and You” and “If An A-Bomb Falls,” the latter distributed by the State of Delaware Dept. of Civil Defense. They offer chilling windows into the early-’50s mindset of how to survive a holocaust.
Hey kid, you’re worried about not being able to afford the newest iPod? Well, at least you don’t have to worry about an atomic bomb going off in your backyard at any moment.