I Read Comic Books discussion

This month we're getting a big head start on Banned Book Week (9/18-9/24) and checking out some banned/challenged comics!

You can find a list of titles (and the reasons people wanted them banned) here: http://cbldf.org/banned-challenged-co...

Pick out one to read and let us know what you think! If your comments are OK to include in the show, please add OK TO AIR to your comment before August 28th.

This episode will be released on August 31st wherever you get your podcasts.

I plan to use this this month’s theme to read Art Spiegelman’s Maus . Back in the early 90s I read the first volume of his biographical/autobiographical account. I always intended to read the second volume, but for reasons I don’t fully recall never quite got around to doing so.

There are so many good books on the list Erin shared! I have Drama on my bookshelf and haven't read it, so that will likely be one of my reads this month.

I also wanted to recommend Gender Queer. It's been challenged, if not banned, numerous times in recent months for discussing non-binary gender identity. I learned a lot from this book, and it's well worth the long page count.

KaitLphere wrote: "There are so many good books on the list Erin shared! I have Drama on my bookshelf and haven't read it, so that will likely be one of my reads this month."

I think I'm going to read Drama too! Seconding the rec for Gender Queer, it was really good!

Lots of interesting books on this list including some I’ve read before. I’ll have to decide if I want to read something new or go back and reread something I had no idea was ever banned.

I admit I was expecting a VERY different list of books, a more… political one, perhaps.

I find the definition of age- appropriate ranges a necessary evil, that has been way too relaxed in the last few years, but I’d hardly call a complaint from parents a “banning”!

I’d much prefer to see a list of books that were banned by governments/ organisations (who have the strength to actually ban or to really affect sales/distribution) as contrary to - THEIR definition of - public interest, rather than some “concerned parents” in local libraries/schools.

Hm, not sure if I know of a consolidated list that matches that. It you have something like that, feel free to email us!

Well, the 1954 Comics Code caused lots of comic books to stop being printed, and some publishers went out of business because of it. That is true censorship there.

Ed said: Well, the 1954 Comics Code caused lots of comic books to stop being printed, and some publishers went out of business because of it. That is true censorship there.

It’s perhaps worth noting that the Comic Code Authority was a form of industry self-censorship. The CCA was clearly a reaction to Senate hearings on the corrupting influence of comic books, but there was no law that mandated it. Mind you, I’m not diminishing the far-reaching and long-lasting effect the code had on the industry. I guess all I’m saying is that the government’s interests can be served, not just by passing laws or imposing regulations, but by creating or bolstering a moral panic that induces those targeted to censor themselves. We’re still seeing that tactic in action today as some libraries proactively remove from their shelves books that they think some may challenge or find offensive.

Dom said: I admit I was expecting a VERY different list of books, a more… political one, perhaps.

Speaking as a U.S. citizen, this was exactly the kind of list I was expecting to see. According to PEN America, the largest category of books banned in public schools (more than a third of the books banned during the past academic year) were targeted because they addressed issues having to do with sex and/or gender. That’s perhaps not surprising given an electorate where a disturbingly large minority subscribe to the odd belief that core elements of the government are controlled by cannibalistic child-sex traffickers. Let me also state that (in my opinion) it is misguided to view these issues as nonpolitical. All one needed to do was watch the recent Senate confirmation hearing for Kentanji Brown Jackson, where a number of Senators implied she was somehow “soft on pedophilia”, to realize that sex/gender is being employed as a potent political wedge issue.

Dom also said: I’d much prefer to see a list of books that were banned by governments/ organisations (who have the strength to actually ban or to really affect sales/distribution) as contrary to - THEIR definition of - public interest, rather than some “concerned parents” in local libraries/schools.

Personally I feel just the opposite. I’m not particularly interested in tracking down, say, the graphic novel equivalent to The Satanic Verses that happened to be banned by some autocratic regime. You may reasonably accuse me of being parochial, but I’m far more concerned about the increase in book bannings/challenges in my own back yard. True, the kinds of bans and restrictions to which I’m referring aren’t directed by some federal or central authority, but the fact that they are instigated at a more local level doesn’t render their effects totally meaningless.

This may be the rebel in me, but I have to say this looks to be a great set of books, and reading the reasons for their bans just made me want to read them, even more, to see how it makes me feel.

I am adding a few to my "to-read" list!

An historical note:

Although the 'moral panic' over comic books had a significant impact in the industry in the early 1950s, it was not the sole reason for the disappearance of many publishers from the field, although it probably influenced the decision of those remaining to target a child audience only, instead of, like comic strips, including adult readers in their market.

Comic book publication had been fading since the late 1940s, along with sales of pulp fiction magazines: A major publisher, Street & Smith (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_...) dropped almost all of their fiction line (except for "Astounding Science Fiction"), and, according to some sources, all their comic books, in 1949. (I'm not certain they had much of a presence in the latter field).

This was blamed in part on the advent of television as competition for a mass audience, and in part on the newly popular cheap paperbacks. Which became a new market for pulp writers when original novels joined the original cheap reprint editions.

The trend away from magazine fiction also may have been due in part to the WW II distribution of special paperback editions to US military personnel, which some believe changed the reading habits of a generation of American men (mostly) away from short stories and serials in disposable magazines.

Ian said: Although the 'moral panic' over comic books had a significant impact in the industry in the early 1950s, it was not the sole reason for the disappearance of many publishers from the field, although it probably influenced the decision of those remaining to target a child audience only, instead of, like comic strips, including adult readers in their market.

I’m not an expert in this arena so I’ll start out admitting that I may be on shaky ground here. I’ve read similar pronouncements from multiple sources about the decline of the pulps in the U.S. starting in the 40s and have no reason to doubt them. I’m less certain about any link between pulp and comic book sales. I’ve seen stats (number of annual publications as the metric) suggesting that the popularity of comic books peaked in 1952 and thereafter plummeted to about half that by 1960. I wouldn’t maintain that all of this decrease was due to the CCA. There may well have been, as you suggest, other contributing factors. And it’s certainly true, as you also noted, that the CCA had a major impact on the content of those comics that survived.

The story is very complicated, and I don't have a complete handle on it: part of the problem in later years was that DC had a grip on the relevant magazine distribution system, which itself discouraged even DC from maintaining a lot of titles, and used it to limit other publishers accordingly. Fewer copies available obviously meant lower sales totals.

Also, the contraction of the periodical publication industry hit other publishers hard. Fawcett, another magazine publisher, which eventually transitioned into paperback books, conceded a (probably successful) defense in the case brought by by DC that Captain Marvel was plagiarized from Superman, and dropped not only the legal case but their whole comics line. This appears to have been a financial decision. Even if Captain Marvel was still outselling Superman, especially in the juvenile market share, profits were diminishing, and they decided not to spend any more on the case.

An additional factor, according the the late science fiction writer and editor, and agent, Fred Pohl, was the break-down of the US-wide distribution system for magazines, which allowed regional distributors to pick and choose what they would deliver, instead of taking whatever the publisher provided, in competition with "American Independent," their national rival. This situation involved post-war profit-taking on warehouses bought up cheap during the Depression, and now more valuable to stockholders as real estate than as distribution centers.

Ian said: The story is very complicated,

Yes, I’m sure you’re correct. Lot of interesting stuff in your comment. Thanks for posting!

Canavan wrote: "It’s perhaps worth noting that the Comic Code Authority was a form of industry self-censorship. ..."

You are correct. It was not a real government "ban".
US Government has banned some materials, usually for being "pornographic". The novel Ulysses and the poem Howl are examples. They also banned sending information about contraceptives through the mail. Whether there were some comics banned in that way is something I don't know offhand.

some libraries proactively remove from their shelves books that they think some may challenge or find offensive.

Right. And and that is troublesome. But I don't think the word "ban" is the right word to describe such things. I think that is what Dom was getting at. People are using the word 'ban' more widely than I'd like, but languages change and there is nothing I can do about that.

Ian said: The story is very complicated,

Yes it is. One more piece of the puzzle is that in the 1940s there were war-related restrictions (bans?) on how much paper publishers could use. Astounding magazine had to reduce the number of issues or number of pages (I've forgotten which). Publishers of novels reduced the size of page margins to fit more text on each page. (I have a book from that period where the back cover contains a long apology about the reduction in page margins.)

Back to the topic... I've already read many of the books that have been challenged in recent times. Not likely to re-read them right now.

Someday I would like to read Maus. But I mostly read digitally, and it isn't available that way as far as I know.

Ed wrote: "in the 1940s there were war-related restrictions (bans?) on how much paper publishers could use. Astounding magazine had to reduce the number of issues or number of pages (I've forgotten which)...."

If I recall correctly, Street and Smith dealt with paper rationing for Astounding, which sold relatively well, at least in part by killing its sister fantasy magazine Unknown/Unknown Worlds, and switching its paper allocation to Astounding.

But there may also have been a change in Astounding's format, I never got into the details of that story, just how it impacted the market for fantasy. And I never had the budget for vintage copies earlier than the post-war years.

One change in Astounding was the loss of serialized novels: too many complaints from readers in the military that they could never depend on getting the next issue, and wanted to know how the story came out. Not to mention that they might not be around for the next issue.

Ed said: Right. And and that is troublesome. But I don't think the word "ban" is the right word to describe such things. I think that is what Dom was getting at. People are using the word 'ban' more widely than I'd like, but languages change and there is nothing I can do about that.

Yes, I take your point, Ed, although don’t wholly agree. Let me say first that I think part of what concerned Dom was the lack of any distinction between a book or graphic novel being “challenged” and the consequences of that challenge. I.e., the link in Erin’s original comment was to a web article entitled “Banned & Challenged Comic Books”; yet, the contents of that article focused as best I can recall almost exclusively on comics that had been challenged. That’s not to say that in the U.S. libraries haven’t pulled books from their shelves, making them partly or completely unavailable to patrons (e.g., Gender Queer ), merely that that didn’t seem to be a focus of this article. Perhaps that’s a shortcoming.

I think I also understand Dom’s point (and yours) about the use of the term “ban” when it is applied to instances where a book is made unavailable by some local entity such as a library as opposed to more global entity such as a federal government, where the terms of the latter ban may have more far-reaching effects, making a book completely unavailable (or nearly so) for all individuals within that government’s jurisdiction. A few points here. First, for better or worse, as far as I know the term “ban” has always been used to describe the situation where a library pulls a book from its shelf. I don’t believe this is a case of the language evolving; for as far back as I can recall, that usage has been fairly consistent. Second, while I understand the theoretical distinction between a federal ban and one promulgated at a more local level, I can’t help but think that an exclusive focus on the former (not all that common these days in democracies, in any case) has the effect of trivializing the latter. As I tried (no doubt clumsily) to say in a previous message, governments need don’t issue nationwide bans (that probably won’t pass judicial scrutiny) in order to at least partly achieve their censorship goals; all they need do is create a climate of fear and a sense of panic and let others do the hard work at a more local level.

Sorry if I’ve rambled on about this topic.

Canavan wrote: "... Sorry if I’ve rambled on about this topic ..."

Don't worry. It is an interesting issue.

I don't talk politics on the internet with strangers, so I'm not going to given any opinion on whether it is appropriate for high school libraries, for instance, removing books on certain topics. It is a thing that happens. I don't often agree with such restrictions. But I'm not gonna talk about it in detail.

Another type of challenge/ban is when activists try to stop a publisher from publishing a book, or ask stores to stop selling it. Without going into any details, I found one such book recently in a little free library. My first thought was to throw it in the trash. Instead, I read it. It has problems, but not as bad as some make it out to be. But the controversy over that book is so strong that I have not logged it as "read" on this website. I just really, really don't like to get in such discussions on public websites, so I am self-censoring in this case.

When reading about the history of Astounding magazine, I found that at some point during or after WWII, Australia banned the importation of that magazine. I don't recall the reason or the details, but it helped jump-start local Australian SF magazines.

There was also a time in 50s or 60s when France banned or restricted importation of American superhero comics. That was an effort to protect the local market and local culture from being overrun by American culture. That may be one reason France (and Belgium) have such a wealth of homegrown comics. Though Donald Duck somehow made it through and became even more popular there than here.

One of the challenged books listed in that CBDF link was Stuck Rubber Baby for "Depiction of homosexuality".

If I remember right, that was really a small part of that book. It dealt much more with racism and the Klan.

But Howard Cruse did write other stuff with lots of gay content such as Wendel. A previous roommate had two original pages from that book mounted on the wall of our living room. They were big. He drew the strip larger than a normal book page. Maybe because it was being printed as a full page of a newspaper.

Anyhow, for this month, maybe I will finally get around to reading The Other Sides of Howard Cruse which I bought a few years back.

I don’t recall the Australian situation, but wartime Britain banned the import of American pulp magazines to save valuable space in cargo ships — which had often shipped them as ballast before the war. Sympathetic Americans mailed copies of Astounding and its rivals to bereft fans.

Of course the science fiction magazines in particular were full of nonsense like jet planes and long-range rockets, Not to mention atomic bombs. Clearly of no possible value (There were experts who were sure the jet and rocket V weapons would never work, right up to when they were hitting London.)

In an unrelated incident George Orwell viewed with alarm all the violence in American pulps, based mainly on boxing stories in which people hit each other a lot, with details.

Ed said: When reading about the history of Astounding magazine, I found that at some point during or after WWII, Australia banned the importation of that magazine. I don't recall the reason or the details, but it helped jump-start local Australian SF magazines.

I don’t recall the rationale or details, but I believe the import ban (starting around 1940) covered all American magazines and lasted until about 1958. It may have been partly or wholly a war-time measure, but my fuzzy recollection is that it was more of a protectionist measure.

Ian said: Of course the science fiction magazines in particular were full of nonsense like jet planes and long-range rockets, Not to mention atomic bombs.

You’ve probably heard about Cleve Cartmill’s 1944 story in Astounding, “Deadline”, in which he described at length an atomic bomb (at that time being secretly developed at Los Alamos). The details were accurate enough to prompt a visit from an alarmed FBI, which feared some security breach had occurred. During the course of a series of interviews, Cartmill, Campbell, Asimov, and others eventually persuaded the authorities that the story’s material had been gleaned from unclassified sources.

Learning so much on this thread! Appreciate all the great discussion. :)

It’s been really interesting to read everyone’s views on banned and challenged books. From a United Kingdom perspective, as far as I’m aware there’s not a big problem in contemporary times with banning of books generally here. Aside from a few viewed as potentially a threat to national security due to potential terrorism e.g The Anarchists Cookbook which are completely illegal, the last book banned was Lord Horror by David Britton between 1990 and 1992 due to obscenity, I believe it was adapted into a graphic novel though I’ve only a brief web search worth of research to fall back on and it’s very difficult to get your hands on a copy. Going back to 1792, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man was banned by a UK government very concerned about avoiding Revolution akin to the recent events in the American colonies and France, and in the early 20th Century there was a rash of bans due to obscenity and a general fear of depictions of sexuality which resulted in bans including, James Joyce’s Ulysses, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover and Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, but in terms of comic books, there was legislation put in place to “to prevent the dissemination of certain pictorial publications harmful to children and young persons” called the Children And Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act 1955. It was a response to the import of US horror comics in the 1950’s, It would be fair to say that this legislation was the result of scaremongering, and was happening in parallel to the events following the publication of Seduction of the Innocent in the US, and to this day apparently no one has been prosecuted in the UK for this offence.

I’ve chosen This One Summer as my book this month, but I’ve also decided to add both Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and Gender Queer to my reading tasks this month.

Really interesting to see how people are thinking about the spectrum of banned (official government) to banned (social/cultural). I think most scholarship on censorship nowadays deals with Foucauldian discourse theory, so they would both very much be considered essential discursive fields in which the "banning" of books occurs.

Looking at the CBLDF list, I am really fascinated by the Neonomicon situation. I've read that book (not by choice) and it is indeed disgusting. My personal opinion about it is that it glorifies and aestheticizes rape in a needlessly disturbing way that no narrative could ever justify. I would happily remove it from bookshelves. Which as many in this thread have pointed out, is not necessarily the same thing as preventing them from making or publishing the book, or applying some sort of punitive consequence for making it.

The library had it shelved in an adult section, and the mother did not look at it very closely before giving her daughter permission to borrow it, so I don't think the library is on the hook here in terms of the kid being exposed to it.

Having said that, I think there is a significant difference between giving harmful content a platform, vs suppressing marginalized people via the stories they tell about themselves. "Lovecraftian rape enthusiast" is not a protected identity. So I think it's a very different thing even if it may fall into a similar discursive field as people trying to remove queer books from library shelves.

Tia said: Having said that, I think there is a significant difference between giving harmful content a platform, vs suppressing marginalized people via the stories they tell about themselves.

Personally, I see little to differentiate the arguments used by those occupying the left versus the right side of political spectrum when it comes to rationalizing the banning of books.

If parents feel that their child ought not to have access to a certain book, school libraries typically have established procedures in place to restrict access for that particular student. If parents feel the need to go this route, that’s fine with me. But when parents want to completely pull a book from the shelf so that my children can’t access it — I have a real problem with that.

Canavan wrote: "Tia said: Having said that, I think there is a significant difference between giving harmful content a platform, vs suppressing marginalized people via the stories they tell about themselves.

Pers..."

I admit, I find it concerning that you don't see much difference between harmful content/hate speech and the expression of protected marginalized identities.

Tia said: I admit, I find it concerning that you don't see much difference between harmful content/hate speech and the expression of protected marginalized identities.

I’ll try as best I can to clarify, Tia. When I hear you trying to differentiate between harmful content versus content that marginalizes, it translates in my brain into something like, “When I want to ban a book it’s because the book contains harmful content, but those other guys are attempting to ban books in an attempt to suppress marginalized groups”. The problem is that all proponents of book banning, whether conservative or progressive, believe their motives are pure; each and every one believes that their group’s beliefs, way of life, &c., &c., are under attack by threatening and dangerous ideas being promulgated by outside groups and forces and that these alarming ideas must be quashed by whatever means necessary. Hence my comment that the arguments attached to the impulse to ban books are typically the same whether one is trying to ban Drama or Neonomicon .

Canavan wrote: "Tia said: I admit, I find it concerning that you don't see much difference between harmful content/hate speech and the expression of protected marginalized identities.

I’ll try as best I can to cl..."

I'm not following your logic.

You start with something specific. De-platforming or restricting harmful content (in my example, glorifying rape. Hate speech is another example) and suppression of representing marginalized identities

Then you shift into the hypothetical and treat these things as though they are the same. You argue that both sides think their position is morally correct and the other is wrong. How, specifically, is representing a marginalized identity harmful? How is it the same kind of harmful as glorifying rape or hate speech? I'm not following your thinking there. I need you give me some specific examples of how those are the same.

Just because some people believe or have been taught, for example, that discussing race or sexuality is "harmful," doesn't make it so. It may make some people uncomfortable, but that is for them to unpack.

But there is literally no example of hate speech not being harmful. There is no example of glorifying rape that is not harmful. So I find it a bit confusing that you are conflating these topics as though they are two sides of the same moral problem, unless the problem is perhaps that everyone should get their way. And when one side's way is "I want to hurt you," and the other side's way is "I want to safely exist," that seems like an easy one.

As an historian, I can also caution that it is unwise to believe proponents of hate speech don't know exactly what they're doing. Their motives are not "pure." Meanwhile people of marginalized identities are literally fighting for their lives. Literally for the right to exist without harm.

I see this conflation happening a lot in media and popular discourse, so much so that there is a term for this. "Bothsidesing." There are some interesting articles about this phenomenon if you look it up.

What I was saying initially about most scholarship on censorship, that it now takes a Foucauldian approach which would land the banning of these things in similar discursive fields, that is not the same thing as saying they are both morally the same. Simply that there is more social complexity to their respective banning or allowing than legal mandates or consequences. Although in both cases there are legal mandates in play, which would again refute the claim that they are morally the same, since marginalized identities are protected under the law and hate speech can in many cases be removed.

So...yeah. They are not the same :)

Maus is extraordinary! I read this two-part graphic novel series years ago and remembered the framework, but re-reading it was eye-opening as further life experiences can make you look at it with whole new eyes.

The artwork is deceptively simple, but it actually shows the realities of the camps in an incredibly precise manner. The black and white illustrations often had six to eight panels per page, which were more orderly when Art and his father were in the modern-day, and more varied in the past to signify the chaos of Vladek’s life. I now understood better the reason why the author portrayed the characters as animals- with mice representing those of the Jewish faith, cats as Nazis, Poles as pigs, the French as frogs and Americans as dogs. This storytelling device surprisingly made them seem more human, as the reader better understands the unfairness of characterizing an entire culture or nationality as the same. It also made them trying to pass as non-Jewish with a mask on, more poignant. Plus, the picture Art drew of himself at his art table on top of mouse corpses while receiving accolades for his first book was heart-rending, for this book took a toll on his mental health too.

This was a perfect book to read as we head into Banned Book Week next month. We simply can not close our eyes to the horrors of the past or the realities of today, and books that address those issues should be read by everyone. This book truly was deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it won in 1992!

For a full review: https://graphicnovelty2.com/2022/08/2...

*Ok to air

I had originally intended for this month’s theme to read Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus , but wasn’t able to locate my print copy (and the book isn’t currently available in an electronic format). So I ended up pivoting to a re-read of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman graphic novels. The American Library Association lists Sandman as one of the top banned and challenged graphic novels. Gaiman’s graphic novel has been challenged and removed from various libraries because of “anti-family themes,” “offensive language,” and for being “unsuited for age group”.

I admit that my interest was largely motivated by the new Netflix Sandman series. Before watching the Season 1 episodes, I wanted to re-familiarize myself with the collected volumes whose events they incorporate — i.e., Preludes & Nocturnes and The Doll’s House . I have to confess I was a bit disappointed. Re-reading reminded me that while those early issues are above average in quality (in a few instances well above average), the series didn’t really start to gain traction until maybe Volume 3. The story-telling, normally Gaiman’s strong suit, in those early issues is often somewhat disjointed. The other real problem is Gaiman’s decision to tie his version of the main character rather tightly to the overarching DC mythology; that’s probably fine for folks well versed in the minutiae of DC lore, but for relative noobs like me it means that following the plot can at times be extraordinarily difficult without the aid of annotations.

Preludes & Nocturnes ✭✭✭
The Doll’s House ✭✭✭½

I ended up reading Maus I: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History and Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began this month, as well as Gender Queer, Blankets, and This One Summer. I'm still planning to read The Color of Earth and Drama. I was pretty enthusiastic with my library holds at the beginning of August!

I ended up reading most of the Wikipedia page for Maus, which was really enlightening. It's the only comic that has read a Pulitzer! It also found it in the history section at Barnes & Nobles instead of the comics section. It's very cool to me that a comic has been taken this seriously in the Academic world.

The most interesting thing to me about Maus is how much of it takes place in the present day at the time of writing (which was in the 1980's). Art's relationship with his father is as much a focus of the book as is his father's experience of the the Holocaust. That juxtaposition makes the mental effects of that experience incredibly clear.