The author of the Ten-Cent Plague talks to Vulture magazine:
What inspired this book? Are you a secret comic-book obsessive?
[Laughs.] Comics are not among my obsessions. I’m not telling you what the real ones are. I’ve always been interested in this stuff, but it wasn’t until I got deep into the work on my second book that I started to realize the deep significance of early comics and the drama of what happened in the forties and fifties. This was largely a fight not over the content of comics, but over the very idea that kids are entitled to have their own taste and their own opinions and points of view. It was a fear on the part of the prevailing Establishment and the parents who embodied that Establishment. I think there’s still a very deep-rooted fear that our kids are going to turn against us like Dobermans.
