Do comic books seem to be getting increasingly edgy? Pushing the limits of art and storytelling with their visual depictions? Corrupting young minds?
Well this isn't a new complaint. This site has a general history of comic book censorship through the decades.
http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/09-08-98/alibi_feat2.html
Still going strong, even the history of comics is being challenged and censored. In California, Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics was challenged due to a mother's complaint. Here's some articles collected about this particular case.
http://www.paulgravett.com/articles/041_californiancontroversey/041_californiancontroversey.htm
A book which can be considered an history of a modern art genre is not allowed to be circulated. Next will images of Renaissance art be taken off shelves?
And an article from 1997 about the history and escalation of comic prosecutions:
http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.4/awm2.4pages/2.4alstonlegal.html
For those interested in looking deeper into this, here's a great bibliography from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
http://www.cbldf.org/research/biblio-30s.html
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12 years ago
1 comment:
One of the things I think is happening is that as graphic novels become more mainstream, the demographics of the readership change, and you get a tension between the old perception, where the genre is targeted toward children and any adult readers are incidental, and the new, where adult readers are acknowledged as an audience in their own right. A lot of complaints seem to arise from the fact that people think that any comic book should be appropriate for children, because comic books by their nature are marketed to children. (The same phenomenon is observable with respect to video games.)
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