In Cleveland, early in May, two council members objected to a prospective ordinance to ban crime comics, one of them arguing that it would "throw Sherlock Holmes and Shakespeare out of the window." A week later, the council voted unanimously to outlaw the sale of comics depicting the "commission or attempted commission of the crimes of arson, assault, burglary, kidnapping, mayhem, larceny, manslaughter, murder, rape, prostitution, sodomy or extortion." Conviction would result in a fine of fifty to five hundred dollars and/or up to six months' incarceration in the city workhouse. To enforce the law, the police department established a permanent detail of two officers dedicated to the comic-book beat. Cleveland's model was Los Angeles County, where, on April 23, William D. Dickey, the proprietor of a drugstore on Florence Avenue in Walnut Park, was arraigned for his arrest on charges of selling a copy of Crime Does Not Pay to a teenager. Around the same time, actions to ban controversial comics were introduced in cities including Baltimore, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Sacramento, and Saint Louis, as well as in numerous smaller towns such as Falls Church, Virginia; Nashua, New Hampshire; and Coral Gables, Florida. (As the Sacramento Union reported in its lead page 1 story, "Crime Comic Book Ban Voted by City Council—$500 Fines, Term in Jail for Violators.")A comics burning in Binghamton, NY, 1948.

Groups of students continued to burn comic books in school yards around the country, some under the sway of their parents and teachers, some in concord with them, some unsure of their own points of view and doubtful of the propriety of disagreeing with their elders, some emboldened to defiance through the burnings themselves. In one case—a grand public protest organized in Rumson, New Jersey, an affluent town near the seashore—the young people involved were exceptionally young, Cub Scouts, and they were only part of an elaborate plan arranged by a Cubmaster, Louis Cooke, a scout committeeman, Ralph Walter, and the mayor, Edward Wilson. As it was announced on January 6 at a "fathers' night" meeting of the Rumson High School PTA, the event was to involve a two-day drive to collect comic books "portraying murderers and criminals," a journalist at the meeting reported. A group of forty Cubs would tour the borough in a fire truck, "with siren screaming, and collect objectionable books at homes along the way." Then the mayor would lead the boys in a procession from Borough Hall to Rumson's Victory Park, where Wilson would present awards to the scouts and lead them in burning the comic books. The Cub who had gathered the most comics would have the honor of applying the torch to the books. When the national office of the Cub Scouts of America declined to support the bonfire, and news papers as far-flung as Michigan's Ironwood Daily Globe questioned it, the Rumson event was revised to conclude with the scouts donating the comics to the Salvation Army for scrap.