Hi, I'm Katie from Berkeley, California. The Sound of Young America is an independent production,

supported by listeners like you and me. If you'd like to donate to support the show,

visit MaximumFun.org and click on donate. Live on tape from my house in Los Angeles,

I'm Jesse Thorn and this is the Sound of Young America from MaximumFun.org.

MaximumFun. MaximumFun. It's the Sound of Young America. I'm Jesse Thorn, America's radio,

sweetheart. My guest on the program is David Haydo. He's the author of a number of noted books of

nonfiction, the most recent of which is the Tencent Plague, the great comic book scare and how it changed

America. Chronicles, the development of comic books in the 1930s and 40s and how the course of

their development was changed irrevocably by an anti-comic book hysteria in the 1950s. David,

welcome to the show. Jesse, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to have you on.

Let me start by asking you what your connection to this story was. I mean, to this point,

you had been known largely for your writing about music. Why did you shift your focus to comic books?

I was partly out of enthusiasm for the medium because I was a comic book reader when I was a kid.

In fact, I even drew before I wrote and I drew an underground comic for my high school newspaper

called the Endless Odyssey of Skip Tumaloo. Wait, what was Skip Tumaloo? Usky? Skip Tumaloo. Not

much and that was his charm. He was kind of a slacker idealized version of myself. I was never a

slacker but I wanted to be. I was a slacker wannabe. So he was like my fantasy ideal. Then he just

kind of wandered through my high school and I drew caricatures of my high school teachers and

they were all an emulation of more drucker from Mad Magazine. The whole attitude of the

strip was a combination of Mad and the underground comics. I had no idea that what I was kind of

doing had deep roots in EC. I didn't realize that for years but the reason I did the book was not

just to indulge my own interest. I have a lot of interest. I like almonds. We were talking about

...