In yesterday’s NYT Book Review, Ron Powers revisits his youth while expressing his ambivalence over David Hajdu‘s The Ten-Cent Plague:
“On a spring morning in 1953, I strolled into Mrs. Shelburne’s sixth-grade classroom at the Mark Twain School and spotted a classmate covertly flipping through a Superman comic. Only it wasn’t quite Superman. Not the Man of Steel I idolized, but a grinning thug-imposter in red cape and blue tights, gut-punching a helpless geezer on crutches as his false teeth flew out and a mob of citizens cheered, and a babe far leggier and bustier than Lois Lane leered her approval. The monster’s name bulged in thick red letters atop the panel: Superduperman. My good-guy stomach rolled. Everything stretched and went slantwise; a parallel universe yawed open, like jaws, and threatened to suck me inside. Then Mrs. Shelburne waddled into class; the kid stowed the comic; the jaws evaporated. Too soon, I realized dizzily. Wait! I wanted in!”
If you’ve never seen that classic bit of Wally Wood art from MAD #4, here it is:
And that’s not even my favorite gag in that strip. As for the review, I gotta disagree with both Powers and Janet Maslin, who each ended their Times pieces with muted criticisms of Hajdu’s open affection for his subjects—which, perhaps I too am an ardent fanboy with a sociohistorical bent, I felt was one of the book’s strengths, and was one of the reasons I looked forward to interviewing Hajdu for Publishers Weekly.
(Couldn’t have done this without Scans Daily!)