One way of looking at the history of U.S. popular culture is to see it as periodic eruptions of condemnation of what young people—or others of “limited sophistication”—like to see, hear, read and do. Such an episode is described in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), David Hajdu’s splendid account of America’s “comic-book scare” of the early 1950s. It is weird—to use one of comic books’ favorite words—to read about events that one has experienced. I grew up on 10-cent comic books . . .