The Ten-Cent Plague

I liked this book though I'm not really the target audience. I was never into comics as a kid, and didn't recognize most of the comics/publishers/artists/authors discussed. So a lot of the "early days inside baseball" stories were lost on me. More relatable were the stories of moral outrage associated with comics, which unsurprisingly play like generic "kids these days" rants (see also rock/rap music, video games, the internet, etc...).

It was also neat to follow through the various boom and bust cycles. Explosions of new ideas followed by stagnation. Attempts at self-regulation giving way to government intervention. The early highs felt emotionally similar to the tech boom of the 90s:

It was a medium coming up, it was new, and I was new, and it would accept people like me, because it didn’t know where the hell it was going, and I didn’t know what the hell I could do, either, and that made it easy and exciting,” said Tom Gill, a resourceful Canadian-born artist, raised mainly in Flatbush, Brooklyn.

And passages like this sounded familiar, as it's the sort of thing that happens anytime curious and creative people gather, from art to music to open source software:

Freshman artists and writers who found themselves working to-gether in comics learned their craft over each other’s shoulders, and their primary gratification apart from the pay of $15 to $25 per page was self-satisfaction or the approval of their peers.

“Oh, it was like a college class for me,” said Bob Lubbers, a comic-loving Long Island native who started drawing for the Centaur company in 1940, at age eighteen. “All I’d do is walk around and see what the other guys were doing. We all did that.
[...]
Everybody had his strengths, and we rooted each other on and stole everything we could from each other.
[...]
We all took mental notes and robbed each other blind.”

I imagine long-time comic book fans will get more out of this book than I did, but there's still interesting stuff in there for other folks!