The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by Hajdu David

Author:Hajdu, David [Hajdu, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Comics, Politics, Art
Amazon: B00139XT6Y
Goodreads: 8391921
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2008-03-18T07:00:00+00:00

Rabbits leave their young on their own, expecting the creatures to sustain themselves or die, about thirty days after birth, and so did comic-book publishers. Their version of test marketing was to create a new product and drop it onto the newsstands to compete with hundreds of other titles, old and new. If the book made money—that is, by the standard model, if it sold at least 60 percent of its print order—the publisher would produce another issue and continue doing so as long as the title remained profitable. Mad was an exception, as it was in many ways, sustained by its makers’ enthusiasms through losses for at least three issues, perhaps four. “The first three issues weren’t too good,” Gaines later told an interviewer. “We were feeling our way along. We lost several thousand dollars. We fell pretty short of a break-even point on our first sales. But in our fourth issue … sales picked up tremendously.” (The print run for the first three issues of Mad was 350,000 copies.) In the article he wrote for Writer’s Digest, Gaines explained, colorfully, “Mad #1 lost money. My editor, Harvey Kurtzman, looked at me mournfully. I looked at him mournfully. Mad #2 lost money. Mad #3 lost money. Mad #4 lost money. Kurtzman and I were not looking at each other at all when the sales reports began to come in on Mad #5. With a bang, we had done it.” Whether the turnaround came with the fourth issue, which included a scalding parody of Superman, or the fifth, which had a deliriously gruesome and sexy cover illustration by Will Elder, instead of one by the magazine’s founding editor, Harvey Kurtzman, Mad had found its voice and its public.

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