Drawn and quartered

Hoover's column is just one of the aromatic artifacts that Hajdu digs up for the book, and he does a good job cherry-picking the details. By 1949, for instance, the police department in Cleveland (where Superman's creators lived) had two full-time police officers on the "comic-book beat." In April of that year, a poor fellow by the name of William Dickey was arrested at his Florence Avenue drugstore in Walnut Park for selling a comic book to a teenager. The title of the comic, fittingly, was "Crime Does Not Pay."

If anything, though, Hajdu goes too wide with his viewfinder, adding example after example of municipal maneuvers and genre trends. He might have found a more human aspect to the story had he lingered longer on individuals such as Gaines, who went on to great success with Mad magazine after EC Comics imploded in the wake of his grilling on Capitol Hill.

Of course, comic book creators are less scintillating than the musicians Hajdu has written about in the past. (He is author of the dazzling 1960s folk-scene portrait "Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina, and Richard Farina" and the equally compelling "Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn.") When he focuses on them, however, he frames the loopy players in this tale with flair. Take this fantastic description of the Munich-born psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, author of the screed "Seduction of the Innocent," and the zealous Anita Bryant of the anti-comics movement: "A compact middle-aged man with brushed-back gray hair and a high forehead hatched with scowl lines, he peered slightly to one side through opaque horn-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a plain, dark tie and a white lab coat, and his expression suggested puzzlement and displeasure. . . . With this image, the emerging crusade against comic books had a face."

Wertham was as much a cartoon as the characters in the comics he railed against. Were he still around, he would be positively stricken by, say, Grand Theft Auto, the modern equivalent of EC's blood lust.

Yet despite the bonfires and the shuttered publishers, the comic books in "The Ten-Cent Plague" have fared far better than the good doctor and his sour peerage. Gaines is now part of a garish gallery of pop culture agitators that includes Sam Fuller and R. Crumb, Eminem and Quentin Tarantino, N.W.A and Howard Stern. More than that, it would take tens of thousands of dollars to put together a library of those vintage EC Comics -- if only because, like defiant martyrs, so many of them went up in smoke.

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geoff.boucher@latimes.com

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On the Web

To read J. Edgar Hoover's 1943 Los Angeles Times opinion piece, go to latimes.com/hoover.

For a gallery of images from "The Ten-Cent Plague," go to latimes.com/comicbooks.