In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. But no sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups and a McCarthyish Congress.

In The Ten-Cent Plague, David Hadju reveals how comics, years before the rock and roll revolution, brought on a clash between postwar children and their prewar parents. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics became the targets of a raging generational culture divide. They were burned in public bonfires, outlawed in certain cities, and nearly destroyed by the televised hearings orchestrated by Congress. The Ten-Cent Plague radically revises common notions of popular culture and the divide between "high" and "low" art.