Source: amazon.com

7. The Ten-Cent Plague

The great comic book scare of the Fifties was one of the most important moments in comic book history.

It’s a story of bright young creators who were crushed by fear mongering and scapegoating. A story of how a medium was repressed for decades when it tried to grow. And David Hajdu’s book captures that story and time period better than anything else. It’s a long story, and one that needs to be viewed from many angles to get the complete picture.

This book succeeds at balancing everything that happened while keeping the story and characters real and relatable. People like Bill Gaines and Stan Lee get to shine, and the time period is very much a character. The backdrop of the Red Scare and the post-war American atmosphere really do craft a perfectly insane picture.

A time that is both bitterly, ironically funny and depressingly heartless and cruel.