I’ve been reading a lot recently; it’s my favourite form of escapism. My hardcover copy of Grant Morrison’s New X-Men Vol. 1 just came back into my possession after years abroad, and it’s staggering how topical it still is after 24 years. As much as I believe that Morrison is possessed of certain shamanic properties or that they’ve secretly been gifted with the mutant power of extreme (x-treme?) foresight…everything is cyclical. In point of fact, just look up Morrison’s mutant manifesto included in certain collected editions of New X-Men.
Back to reading…it’s rare to be reading the right book at the right time. I’m not talking about The Secret or Rich Dad Poor Dad, or any of the other crap that used bookstores will no longer accept because they’re already packed to the rafters with them. The right book is Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics, and the right time is now.
Check it out:
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.
Out of the Gutters is a hefty, scholarly tome and I was delighted to get a chance to check it out. If you’re a fan of the comics medium, you owe it to yourself to read this book, if only to educate yourself. Just the other day, I was thinking back to the first time I saw the documentary Crumb. I couldn’t have been more than 17 or 18 at the time, and I was always kind of vaguely aware of Robert Crumb (I had a pal with older siblings in art school), but the film really served to illuminate the wider world of comics that I had yet to discover.
Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics serves as an important historical document as well as a guidebook, especially if you’ve been taking comics at face value all these years. Faux moral outrage is always the order of the day, time and time again, and people keep falling for it, sadly. Read more comics, read banned books, and read this book before it’s too late.
