What’s also disappointing is that Hajdu doesn’t follow up on the second half of his subtitle: he credits comics with helping to create “the popular culture of the postwar era” but doesn’t have much to say about how the comics scare went on to affect popular culture. Aside from putting a lot of cartoonists out of work (a 15-page appendix is simply a list of names of people who never again worked in comics after the mid ’50s) and forcing EC to convert its most enduring comic, Mad, into a magazine in order to survive, the scare seems not to have had much of a lasting effect outside the industry. (Or, in the long run, within: the Comics Code still exists, but it’s toothless and all but abandoned.) It was comics themselves that changed America; the scare Hajdu lovingly details barely impeded that change.
David Hajdu | Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St, Cambridge | April 3, 6 pm | $5 | 617.661.1515
Related:
Next steps, Cracks in the armor, Screwing the youth, More 
- Next steps
There’s a perverse, painful pleasure in recalling a particular New York Times Magazine essay by David Hajdu back in December 2000.
- Cracks in the armor
A couple of cracks have opened in the state’s armor of prison secrecy.
- Screwing the youth
Wole Akinbi was 16 when someone phoned to say his best friend had been shot.
- The case of Milan Kohout
Kohout, a serious man, was engaged in the serious business of political protest.
- Framed?
The Boston Phoenix has uncovered substantial new information about the Cowans case.
- Righting a staggering wrong
US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan should launch an investigation into how that department managed to help convict the wrong man in the 1997 shooting of a Boston cop.
- Cash carousel
Even though the dollar has taken an international whupping of late, there remains at least one place where the love of the greenback remains strong: Beacon Hill.
- A beautiful lie
In an era when “conservative” can mean favoring federal deficits and government intrusion into private lives, and “liberal” has become synonymous with support for states’ rights and opposition to activist judges, terms like “pro-choice” and “pro-life” have drifted into foggy territory.
- Naked in the public square
In the finest Puritan tradition, Middlesex District Attorney Gerald Leone is crusading to save Harvard Square from the shock and awe of the nude human form.
- P-town’s not-so-secret vice
Something went seriously awry in Provincetown this summer, where several attacks with possible homophobic overtones were ignored by, and in one case was committed by, the town’s own law-enforcement officials.
- Cambridge vs. Anthony Galluccio
Cambridge city councilor Anthony Galluccio is still working to fulfill the promise he showed 10 years ago.
- Less
Topics:
Books
, Media, Books, Graphic Novels and Comics, More
, Media, Books, Graphic Novels and Comics, Law, Criminal Law, David Hajdu, Billy Strayhorn, Juvenile Justice, Less
