From a web page dedicated to comic books:
Look through your comic book collection. Do you have Alan Moore’s “Lost Girls”? Any of S. Clay Wilson’s Underground Comix? Even Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman” series? If the prosecution of manga collector Christopher Handley sticks, all of that and more could be considered obscene, Gaiman told MTV.
“I wrote a story about a serial killer who kidnaps and rapes children, and then murders them,” Gaiman said, referring to a storyline in “The Doll’s House.” “We did that as a comic, not for the purposes of titillation or anything like that, but if you bought that comic, you could be arrested for it? That’s just deeply wrong. Nobody was hurt. The only thing that was hurt were ideas.”
I strongly disagree. Strongly. Serial killers and raping children are topics that in no way are the province of comic books. I'm not at all sure they're in the province of anything thats significantly more likely to be read by kids than by adults. We don't expose malleable youth to the foul parts of life. Standards exist to keep that from happening. Smirking, giggling, look-what-we-got-away-with types, which is what I consider peopel who write and illustrate this kind of story to be, don't get to determine what those standards should be. Yes, standards can be overdone -- but no one's ever died because we didn't let them play in the cesspool.
If that marks me as a prude or some sort of repressed fogy, I'll wear that badge proudly.
3 comments:
So, I don't need to ask you how you feel about the porn industry trying to get some of that bail-out money for their cash strapped industry?
But these are adult comics, sold to adults, marked FOR MATURE READERS or similar, sold from the adults only areas of comic stores, and Underground Comics, drawn 40 years ago and sold to adults then and since...
...not children's comics.
I didn't know that, but I stand by the comment, for a single reason: they're manga. My daughter, who's 14, reads manga. She's read for about two years. It's possible that there's adult manga and non-adult manga; to her, the difference might not be apparent. If its misfiled, mixed in with the other manga, she'd see it. "For Mature Readers? Hot damn, lemme see that..."
I don't want to appear (or be) a priss about this. I know that people have always tut-tutted about things with which they disagree, saying that the 'current moral decay will be the death of society'. I think, for example, of R Crumb's work, which I liked when I was in my late teens. At the time, people spoke harshly about it, saying exactly that sort of thing. Personally, I thought it was funny. I didn't have any desire to do dope or engage in massive amounts of sex (well, at least, not as a result of seeing it in a comic), and I thought that people who felt that way were overreacting. I don't want to do that. On the other hand, I don't want to underreact, either.
I was surprised to read the comment from Gaiman, because I've read some of his work; thought I didn't like it all, I thought it marvelously inventive and creative - American Gods, for example, stunned me with its vision of a world that I could never have imagined. I suspect this form of manga is the same idea -- an insight into a world which doesn't exist, but which could, sketched brilliantly. That level of ability is to be cherished. But, just as razor-sharp knife is cherished in the kitchen, it can harm the user unless treated with caution and respect. Thats what I'm advocating here. Keep this stuff out of the hands of kids. Make damn sure of it. Treat it like a loaded weapon.
I assume it's time now for me to refer to 'young whippersnappers'.
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