My mother was none too pleased when, at the age of 10 or 11, I became obsessed with comic books. It was clear that she regarded my fascination with Casper the Friendly Ghost, Archie & Jughead, Batman & Robin, the Incredible Hulk, and their cohorts as a mind-rotting waste of time. But she knew better than to forbid me to read them; perhaps she was remembering her own childhood, in the mid-1950s, when comic books were condemned as something considerably worse than a brainless distraction for the demographic groups now known as tweens and teens.

As David Hajdu’s new book, “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $26), shows, there was a time when comics were universally regarded as the boogeyman of literature, an epidemic-like scourge that was believed to be the major cause of juvenile delinquency, illiteracy, bad grades, mass idiocy, and what was understood to be the general moral decay of society. Comic books were not only blamed for warping the fragile young minds of children, they were all but accused of ruining their eyesight and stunting their growth.

There are obvious parallels to the Red Scare of the same period, as Mr. Hajdu shows. Yet there were also different forces at work: Mr. Hajdu convincingly makes a case that comic books, long before pop music, were the first form of American culture created exclusively for children. When the self-proclaimed protectors of children’s welfare put comic books almost entirely out of business in 1954–55, they weren’t merely controlling what America’s youth read and thought, they were trying to prevent what later became known as the generation gap from ever developing.

In a narrative that’s as swiftly moving and well-rendered as any episode of “Superman” or “The Flash,” Mr. Hajdu interweaves two tales. First is the evolution of the comics themselves, from the Yellow Kid and other newspaper cartoons at the turn of the century to the earliest collections of comic strips in magazine form around 1935, to the development of the comic book genre that proliferated immediately before, during, and after World War II — superheroes, crime, and police stories, teenage humor, and romance. At the same time, Mr. Hajdu chronicles the simultaneous, steadily growing movement to suppress the comics, to make sure that children were only exposed to ideas that were pre-approved by teachers and preachers.

The two stories finally collide with the growing popularity of horror comics in the early ’50s, thanks largely to EC Comics, its progressive publisher Bill Gaines, and the brilliant staff of artists and writers that he encouraged to be as creative as possible. Yet it wasn’t because the stories in magazines like Tales From the Crypt concerned themselves with axe murderers and the undead that made them so disturbing: In the actual plots of EC’s horror comics, the wicked are almost always punished and virtue triumphs no less consistently than in the publisher’s crime comics.

What so incensed the gatekeepers of morality was that the stories, even those without a criminal or supernatural element, were just plain weird, unsettling, and thought-provoking, right down to their twist endings (allegedly inspired by O. Henry but actually more a sinister foreshadowing of “The Twilight Zone.”) As the underground cartoonist R. Crumb put it, “The art quality [of EC Comics] was the tops and they had the best storytelling. They were also the most serious comics in the ’50s, and they were forbidden, and that made them all the more exciting.”

By the late ’40s, church leaders and others began to stage ritual burnings of comic books, which seemed all too reminiscent of the book burnings in Nazi Germany just a few years earlier. Gaines himself fought back with ads in his own comics pointing out, rightfully, that the suppression of ideas and the concept of government-enforced censorship were generally methods associated with our Cold War enemies behind the Iron Curtain. Yet Gaines, like a “Haunt of Fear” protagonist, caused his own undoing; in testifying before a Senate subcommittee, he expressed his opinion that the image of a severed head in a horror story was appropriate and in “good taste” relative to the context. The whole idea of young readers having their own taste and making their own decisions about what was good and bad was precisely what the legislators were objecting to.

In the end, the moral guardians won the battle by putting the comic book industry out of business (for a time), but lost the war: Soon enough, the generations would be divided by rock ‘n’ roll, civil rights, and Vietnam. “Ten-Cent Plague” is a thrilling read which shows how comic books helped set the stage for much of postwar American culture.

wfriedwald@nysun.com