Drawn and quartered

BILL GAINES was supposed to be a chemistry teacher, but blood, ink and Dexedrine sweat carried him down a different path. He had a passion for science and a quirky mania for measurements; to organize his desk, he used a ruler and T square, arranging his blotter, stapler and letter opener in a precise pattern. None of that mattered, though, after his father, comics publisher M.C. Gaines, died in a boating accident on Lake Placid in August 1947. Gaines' mother implored her son, who had been finishing his studies at New York University, to take over the family business, Educational Comics, a torpid little enterprise based in a low-rent office on Lafayette Street in New York's Little Italy.

Gaines moaned that he was running the "smallest, crummiest outfit in the field," but within a few years he had made a name for himself and EC Comics, as it came to be known. This was due to a startlingly deep reserve of creative talent -- including Harvey Kurtzman, Wally Wood, Frank Frazetta, Johnny Craig and John Severin -- and a flair for gore, mayhem and gruesome twist endings. Working with Al Feldstein, one of his partners in comics crime, Gaines would stay up until dawn on diet medication, tearing through magazines and short stories looking for ideas he could pinch for EC's "Crime SuspenStories" or "Tales From the Crypt."

Somehow, the teacher-in-training had become a merchant of lurid pulp and, in the eyes of some culture crusaders, a predator. In April 1954, Gaines, like one of the Mafia dons who also operated out of his neighborhood, found himself testifying before a Senate subcommittee.

Gaines' congressional appearance is one of the climactic moments in "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America," David Hajdu's history of the very serious attack on funny books. Here, Hajdu doggedly documents a long national saga of comic creators testing the limits of content while facing down an ever-changing bonfire brigade. That brigade was made up, at varying times, of politicians, lawmen, preachers, medical minds and academics. Sometimes, their regulatory bids recalled the Hays Code; at others, it was a bottled-up version of McCarthyism. Most of all, the hysteria over comics foreshadowed the looming rock 'n' roll era; like Elvis and his pelvis, the funny books encoded adult titillations in packages sold to a young audience.