Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics

Comics have long been a subject of moral panics, no doubt thanks to their in-your-face illustrations and their association with young readers. Indeed, the politicians and parents behind today’s book-banning campaigns reserve special ire for graphic novels. What makes today’s controversies different is the content of the alleged obscenity. Instead of targeting sex as such, censors now focus on affirmations of nonheteronormative identity, as in Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer. And while violence is a constant in comics, stories that acknowledge nationalist oppression and violence, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, are also being blacklisted.

Out of the Gutters assembles scholars from diverse disciplines to examine US comics, graphic novels, and cartooning that have been challenged as obscene or transgressive. Covering well-known underground figures like Robert Crumb and Charles Burns, newcomers such as C. Spike Trotman and Emil Ferris, and mainstream creators including Chris Claremont and Archie Goodwin, the collection explores the market economics of transgression, historical representations of graphic violence, the ever-changing meaning of pornography, sex-positive comics by BIPOC authors, and queerness in pop-culture mega-properties like X-Men and The Walking Dead.