According to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, the Alamogordo Public Schools banned Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere last week after one parent filed a complaint over the book, claiming the content was “rated R” and inappropriate for her 15-year-old daughter. Gaiman’s classic work has been on the school’s reading list for nine years and this is the…
Banned Books Week, the national celebration of the Freedom to Read, starts this Sunday! Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is a sponsor of Banned Books Week, and will be joined in the celebration by members of ComicsPRO, the comics retailer trade association who will be hosting displays and events to raise awareness of the comics…
(In honor of Banned Books Week (September 30-October 6, 2012) we are reprinting this list from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and will be reprinting lots of stuff from them over the coming week to highlight their efforts. Donate now! âCM) Banned Books Week is upon us, and itâs telling that the event is…
CBLDF has joined forces with the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression to write a letter in defense of Alan Moore’s Neocomicon (Avatar Press), which has recently been challenged in the Greenville, South Carolina, public library system. Objections to Neonomicon were raised by a patron after her teenage daughter…
With the President’s recent open approval of same-sex marriage; a federal appeals court striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (claiming it unconstitutional); the success of Life with Archie #16, featuring the marriage of a gay character; and Marvel and DC’s inclusion of prominent storylines about gay characters, one may surmise it is easy for…
This one’s for Martha … Nothing like a good book to get the rabble-rousers going. In Field Of Dreams, Ray Kinsella’s wife, played by Amy Madigan, successfully shuts down the effort to ban Terence Mann’s books from the local Iowa school system. Terence Mann – played by James Earl Jones – was based on J.D….
It’s spring, that magical time of year when the flowers bloom, birds sing, and school libraries publish the list of books most frequently banned or attempted to be banned. This year’s list is a mixture of new best sellers and timeless classics. You’ve got your Hunger Games, your To Kill a Mockingbird, your Brave New World…
Stuck in the Middle, the Ariel Schrag edited look at middle school comedy and shame, isn’t a G-rated romp through age 13, but given its subject matter, how could it be. Instead it’s an awful painful look at the most painful ages of all, told by 17 cartoonists including Schrag, Daniel Clowes, Joe Matt and…
The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is currently in the middle of a massive fundraising drive, set in the middle of Banned Books Week. They’ve been auctioning off a lot of neat items, including professional development reviews with Tom Brevoort and Chris Burnham (also available for lunch) and a meet-and-greet for Saturday Night Live. But…
The Brooklyn (New York) Public Library has removed Tintin au Congo from its shelves. If you want to read the graphic novel, you’ve got to ask for it and risk that “what are you, a bigot?” glower from the librarian. In an act of insane political correctness, somebody looked at the tome and bitched about…
Not too long ago, I served as editor of a college newspaper, meaning I also headed up the editorial board that oversaw the paper’s opinion pages. More than a few times, the editorial board would be hard-pressed to come up with some topic worthy of bloviating upon. I can only hope such a desperate lack…
I haven’t seen the movie The Golden Compass, but I will, and soon. I don’t care if it’s a complete piece of crap – I want to see it because the Religious Right told me not to. They say that sort of thing a lot. Here’s what pissed me off. They said the author of…
