Let Me Re-Read It Alone A Few Times And Get Back To You
Apparently two library employees - it seems to be unclear whether they were assistants or professional librarians - in Nicholasville, Kentucky have been fired for denying a child access to material the pair considered pornographic.
That material? Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Personally, I don't remember any porn in that book, which suggests three possibilities: my aged mind can no longer remember what I've read, there was a distinct lack of explicit sexual content or it wasn't very good. I'd guess that would do for ranking them in descending order by likelihood, too, come to think of it.
I do enjoy that The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - Century: 1910 featured the shamelessly gender-twisting Orlando as a supporting character, and I expect that would probably be upsetting to the sort of person who thinks The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is more smut than art, but I just can't think of anything that qualifies as porn in the original comic.
Does that mean there's zero content which acknowledges sex or romance, though? Actually, there is one romantic relationship that develops over the course of the book but I recall it all happening more or less off-camera. No, I suspect the problem here is that comics non-readers have one concept of comics - say, Archie, which is not to say there is anything wrong with Archie - and then they look at a modern graphic novel and that concept either goes out the window or they decide that what they're holding is not a comic book.
Read on for why I think comics are special!
I have to think this sort of thing - which I realize is nothing new - will happen more and more as adults such as ourselves continue to enjoy works of serial art and they are included in shared repositories of culture such as public libraries. It's certainly a fascinating f'rinstance of social values in general, anyway. After all, every schismatic social issue of the day - and of all days in all eras, most likely - can be reduced to a conflict between those who want to expand the boundary of what is allowed in the public square and those who want to shrink that same boundary. I think I'm willing to defend the position that comics are, by nature of their place in entertainment and culture, especially good at triggering strong responses both in those who seek to experience the borders of expression and those who make it their personal mission to decide what is acceptable and what is not.
Comic books in particular touch something deep in the psyche. These are where many of us get some of our first education in narrative conventions, our first twist endings, our first tragic betrayals, our first unlikely triumphs, our first heroes, our first villains. Many comic books provide us with clear definitions of who is wrong and who is right: Lex Luthor is wrong and Superman is right. Even a hero as at home in shades of gray as Batman has countless more simplistic representations available for consumers who need less philosophy and more shark repellent. Because originally they were meant for children, some people project an expectation of innocence or at least simplicity onto comics as a whole.
(I grew up reading a comic in which the Klingons were still ciphers for communism, so I am at home with the presence of simple themes in some of my favorite books and I welcome the diversity of comics demanded by a diverse readership.)
To be honest, I think when someone who believes comics are never more complicated than Archie cracks open a copy of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it should blow their mind or they're not paying attention. Is it porn? No, that's a ridiculous assertion, dismissible on its surface by anyone with even a passing familiarity with the work. No journalist with a grain of professionalism could so much as flip through a copy of League and accept that description of it. My point is that comics have grown as their readers and writers have grown and the breadth of experience and opinion that comics are now able to describe is larger than ever, as large as any other medium, and some people don't know that. I also think some people do know that and don't like it.
I will readily acknowledge the possibility that they're just busybodies. Maybe they would have done the same thing with a copy of Judy Blume's Forever or Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Maybe they've done the same thing a hundred other times to other kids, with other books, and this was the first one to complain. I can't help but wonder whether the fact it was a comic was a particular sticking point for them, though, and if so then it's just a matter of writing them off or helping them to understand. Which way to go is actually more up to them than anyone else.
So how do we help someone who seeks in good faith to understand where the lines are drawn between art and "adult" in modern media? I say we do what we've already proven ourselves to be so very good at doing: we educate them. I want someone to get them to read comics. I honestly don't get a kick out of the thought of anyone heckling a couple of unemployed library staff. I don't want to make their lives harder. I want someone who knows them to buy them a couple of books of Sandman or Top 10 or megawatt-hot Grant Morrison's Superman and then say to them, "OK, if you're really serious - if it's not just about deciding to appoint yourself watchers over others' choices - go read these and then come back and we'll talk."
Happily, and I confess somewhat surprisingly, people seem to be doing some positive things in comics' favor here and there. My Google News alerts the last few days have been rife with stories about public libraries getting grants from one organization or another to establish or expand their collections of graphic novels. Neat.
In the meantime, I note with some small amusement that Nicholasville is near Lexington and that the one time I tried to go to a gay bar in Lexington, many years ago, I found it closed. It's probably wrong of me to hold a grudge against a whole town like that, but it is what it is.
Klarion
Posted to Say What?, editorial on 29 October 2009
· Comments (7)
Other stuff like this: Alan Moore, Kentucky, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Well... in the final act of the book Quatermain does push Mina up against a tree and they get a little closer than Victorian society would deem appropriate. A lot closer, in fact. it involves sweating and petticoats-about-ankles action.
Damn my aged mind! :)
The original article says "a book from The League of Extraordinary Gentleman series". Tell me if any of these suppositions sound false:
It's in a library, so it's probably a collection, not an individual comic.
If it had been the first volume, the article would simply have said "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", not "a book from the series".
An explicit, realistic copulation between Allan Quatermain and Mina Murray is depicted in volume two.
That said, remember the two women were fired for taking it on themselves to decide that the 11-year-old shouldn't see this book. Library policy is that it's nobody's business but yours (and parents, in the case of a minor) what you read.
@Daniel Was it volume two? Yeah, I guess it was... though, if it was volume two in question then there's more than just that. I mean, there's the business with Hyde and Griffin. I can understand a librarian being concerned about an 11 year old reading that, regardless of whether I agree with their actions.
Yeah, I wouldn't give The Black Dossier to a kid either.
First off, I am extremely glad to hear from people who think I'm missing something, in part because sitting around agreeing would be just as boring as could be and in part because I'm just as likely as anyone else, if not more so, to be missing something. :)
I will agree that there are parts of League that have graphic content. However, I would also argue that much of the same content in another medium wouldn't cause anyone to bat an eye. Plenty of twelve year olds have seen the Matrix movies, but one of them contains a great big rave-orgy thing. Plenty of twelve year olds have access to cable TV, which can be extremely graphic, and the fact that something like Big Brother After Dark runs in the middle of the night means nothing in the DVR age. So, I think there is equally easy access to equivalent content in other media. Now, that could be argued to be irrelevant since those examples are other media, but that's the meat of my position: people react to comics differently than they would react to the same content in another form.
Also, I think there's more to the question of porn/not-porn than a binary, yes or no answer. In my opinion, there's a whole spectrum of content and that's why movies and TV shows and videogames have some form of rating system they use. In my personal opinion, calling League "pornographic" is painting with too broad a brush. Lots of works have sexual content of varying degrees of explicitness yet are not considered pornographic.
I don't deny that League is a spicy meatball, but I do deny that its function is to titillate rather than to tell a story and I think people have an especially strong reaction to the sex in League, regardless of which volume or arc is in question, because it's a medium they don't expect to contain anything at all along those lines.
Klarion, out of curiosity have you read the Black Dossier? Because it's not just suggestive, or racy. It's explicit. You see everything. Far more than you'd even see on TV, short of serious pay-channels (not even on good ol' skin-e-max which goes way out of it's way to avoid showing the juicy bits).
I agree that the question of porn vs. art remains. But that's kind of irrelevant if you ask me. I don't think kids should be looking at a bunch of sex even if it's 'arty' sex instead of porn sex.
I think it's also worth something that the library in question was even stocking the Black Dossier (if, in fact, that's what we're talking about) where such a book probably wouldn't have even been in public libraries just a few years ago.
In the end, though, the librarian should have probably simply spoken to the child's parents about the matter and left it up to them.