IN 1948, A GROUP OF SCHOOLCHILDREN in Binghamton, New York, organized a crusade against one of the most feared and controversial threats facing America at the time. They weren't after Communists or drugs or juvenile delinquency, but a greater force that allegedly served as a gateway to those ills — comic books.

The kids hectored business owners into curtailing their stock of lurid comics like "Wonder Woman" and "Crime Does Not Pay," boycotting and sometimes even picketing those who refused. In a particularly grim irony, when a student broke the boycott, he was beaten up by the mob of young protesters.

This is one of many outrageous stories recounted by pop culture historian David Hajdu in his exhaustive and fascinating new book, "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America."

A music critic for The New Republic who has written well-received books on jazz composer Billy Strayhorn and the Greenwich Village folk scene, Hajdu chronicles the controversy surrounding comic books, beginning with the uproar over newspaper strips like "The Yellow Kid" at the turn of the century and culminating with the Kefauver hearings in 1952, which effectively hobbled the industry and created an unofficial blacklist against comics artists and publishers.

"I knew going in that comic books were controversial," says Hajdu, "but I had no idea that they were as controversial as they were. There were over one hundred pieces of legislation banning or restricting the sale of comic books all around the country."

After collecting as many of these comics as possible, Hajdu began the painstaking process of tracking down the writers and illustrators who created them. "It was important for me to find the comic-book artists, who felt a sense of pride in this work," he says. "They were expressing ideas and sensibilities that were important to them, but had the opportunity to do so robbed from them."

Those sensibilities appealed to kids, but frightened adults. In addition to anti-comics newspaper editorials and legislature, schools across the country held massive comic-book burnings, with parents and teachers often forcing students to participate. These sections, fueled by interviews with the children 50 years later, are some of the book's most disturbing passages.

The irony, Hajdu points out, is that the forces that sought to protect children from the violence and depravity of comics effectively manipulated them and silenced their voices. "One of the key issues is not just what the kids were reading or the values that the kids were embracing, or even that they're different values from their parents' values," he explains, "but the very right of young people to have tastes of their own."

» EXPRESS: Did you read comics as a kid?
» HAJDU: I liked them when I was quite young, but I don't inflate my interest in comics. It wasn't atypical to go through a phase of reading comics when you were young if you're my age. But I didn't ever amass a collection.

» EXPRESS: Did you realize just how controversial comic books were when you started this project?
» HAJDU: When I was working on my second book and was making a study of 20th century popular culture, I started to get a glimmer of the fact that comics played some role in the evolution of the culture that we're still living in. But I had no idea of the depth of comics' influence or even the drama surrounding the battle over comics until I started making a serious study of the subject for this book. And I was really stunned. Comics were the most popular form of entertainment in the country — more popular than television or radio or movies or anything else. And they could express this sensibility and embrace a set of social and aesthetic values that I always associated with rock 'n' roll, but I didn't realize had come out of another form before rock 'n' roll.

» EXPRESS: How difficult was it to track down the comic-book artists and readers?
» HAJDU: It's hard to even describe this without sounding self-congratulatory, but it's just grassroots research. I tried to get as many of the original comics in my hands as possible and not just read articles about comics. If I did that, I'd only find the people who'd already been talked to. So I went to the original comics and I looked for the names that were scrawled in the corners. They've never been interviewed, so they were hard to track down. I made a lot of blind phone calls. It takes months before you find the right person. I had a pile of phone books from cities in Florida that I had identified as the major retirement communities. I figure the people who are of that age, who grew up and worked in the Northeast, probably retired to Florida. So, when I had a name, I would go through the Florida phone book, thinking they would be in Florida. It sounds kind of dumb and simple, but I was right half the time.

I was very lucky to have had an opportunity to speak to a number of the kids who took part in these events and to have gotten them at a point when they were still young enough to have vivid memories of certain events. I went down to Spencer, West Virginia, and interviewed David Mace [who helped organize a comic-book burning], and his mother had saved all the local newspaper clippings and kept them in a cigar box. They were like these precious artifacts of this harrowing event, and he opened it up and laid it out for me. That's where the specific incantations that the kids gave came from, and he had photographs. That's how I was able to be so specific about what the kids said and did that day.

» EXPRESS: How was writing about comics different than writing about music?
» HAJDU: It was hard, but that's one of the reasons I wanted to do it. I wanted to do something that was a new challenge. Don't you like to do that as a writer, try to find something new to write about?

» Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW; Mon., 7 p.m., free; 202-364-1919. (Van Ness)

Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo by Michelle Heimerman/Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Posted by Express at 6:57 AM on April 7, 2008
Tagged in Books , Comic Books , Entertainment , The District , Top Stories , Van Ness