« Regina Lynn: From Spam to Porn to Art | Main | Link of the Day - Sex Tetris »
April 16, 2006
Burn the Books!
According to this article in ICV2, Suburban LA County Pulls Manga Text from Libraries, Bill Postmus, Chairman of the Board of Supervisors of suburban San Bernadino County, California, ordered "Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics" off the shelves of the county libraries.
He proudly announced the move, calling the book "obscene comics," on the county's Website, saying, "That book is absolutely inappropriate for a public library and as soon as I was made aware of it yesterday, I ordered it to be removed immediately."
The video game industry and comics have long had a political pairing. Both games and comics are believed to be "for kids" (note that the average gamer is a 30-year-old male according to the Entertainment Software Association). With this popular, but false, perception, the "obscene" barometer often much lower than one would otherwise expect. Back in the 1950's, the Comics Code was created to protect people from the menace that was comics.
What Postmus did, unfortunately, was to protect people from art.
To save Postmus some time, he might also want to consider getting rid of these other books also available in the same library system: the Kama Sutra, Orgasms for Two and the ultra violence & sex extravaganza, A Clockwork Orange.
Posted by BrendaBrathwaite at April 16, 2006 08:14 AM | Discuss this post on our forums