Ever since Bill Watterson's retirement in 1996, observers have been predicting the death of the newspaper comic strip. Syndicates rarely launch more than three strips a year, new strips often appear in 30 newspapers or less, and it's increasingly difficult for a cartoonist to make a decent living off of a strip within two years of launch. Mark Tatulli's Liō, however, launched in over 100 newspapers and quickly gained traction in an increasingly uncertain business. His other daily strip, Heart of the City, hit its peak around the 100-paper mark, and faces many of the same difficulties as other "new" strips in an ever-shrinking market.

It's hard to find two more disparate strips in the modern newspaper comics section than Heart of the City and Liō. Heart is a charming, dialogue-driven, often sentimental, family strip starring a sunny, adorable little girl, while Liō is an odd, pantomime, often wince-inducing comic starring a disturbing, sociopathic little boy. The strips are so different in tone that it's not uncommon for readers to assume that there are two different Mark Tatullis on the comics page, each with a different art style, sense of humor, and signature (which is just one of many ways that he keeps the two strips at arm's length from each other).

Defending the Indefensible

The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America
David Hajdu
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
448 pp., $26.00
Hardcover
ISBN: 9780374187675

Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture
Bart Beaty
University Press of Mississippi
238 pp., $22.00
Softcover
ISBN: 9780374187675

When history becomes folklore, one construction often put on events is "It Never Would Have Happened If It Wasn't For That Lousy Guy." Popular configurations include "If it wasn't for Charles Darwin, everybody would still believe in God," or "If it wasn't for Alfred Kinsey there wouldn't have been a sexual revolution," or "If it wasn't for Dr. Spock these kids wouldn't be running wild," or the case in point here, "If it wasn't for Dr. Fredric Wertham we never would have had the Comics Code." As memory of the facts faded, the idea that Wertham singlehandedly concocted a witch hunt against comics out of thin air had a strong appeal to those of us who wanted to see it simply as a matter of freedom of expression crushed by the forces of repression. In The Ten Cent Plague of David Hajdu (a prepared mind that fortune has favored), Dr. Wertham comes across for all his prominence as a dispensable character in the comic-book pogrom of the '50s. As Hajdu informs us, the anti-comics campaign was a broad-based movement, encompassing the government, the press (daily, weekly and monthly; lowbrow, middlebrow and intellectual), churches, civic groups and individual activists, a movement that had a full-scale dry run, including a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation before Wertham came to the forefront. Because Wertham emerged as their most effective spokesman, the movement used him; if he hadn't been there, they would have gotten along without him, and the outcome would have been the same. To the extent Wertham's agenda differed from the movement as a whole it was ignored. If there was an indispensable man it was Senator Estes Kefauver. Or William M. Gaines. Hajdu makes the telling point that the New York Times account of the 1954 subcommittee hearing before which they both appeared devoted one paragraph to Wertham's testimony and 13 to Gaines'.