Drawing the Line

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This state of affairs moved a group of comic book retailers and publishers to set up the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The CBLDF has picked up the tab for Diana's defense (over $40,000 to date), and he has managed to get the conditions of his probation stayed until after his appeal. The group also helped fight the Parks and Lee cases and worked on a legislative case in California that would tax comic books as "commercial illustrations" rather than creative manuscripts. The latter effort has received almost no notice in the press, according to CBLDF executive director Susan Alston, but its ramifications for comic artists are significant in that taxes would be applied retroactively -- an action that could bankrupt or otherwise drive many small-time comic artists out of business.

It must be said that many of the comics in question in the obscenity cases are extremely explicit. Boiled Angel, with its depictions of bestiality, sexual dismemberment, and priests sodomizing children, is -- by any standards -- an extraordinarily horrific vision. Any merchant who wants to stay in business, however, knows enough to keep titles like this out of the hands of minors: Adult-only comics are generally sealed in plastic or kept in out-of-reach display cases. The question is whether adults should be allowed to make, sell, or purchase them at all.

The question might not be asked if there was a stronger tradition of adult comics in the United States. In Japan, adult-oriented manga comics have been widely read for years, and in various Latin American countries it's not uncommon to see 40- and 50-year-olds enjoying comic-strip books on the bus home from work. The success of Art Spiegelman's Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic-strip memoir about a family living through the Holocaust and its psychic aftermath, proved that Americans could grasp the idea of adult-oriented illustrated literature. But until the medium can shake its image as an artless corrupter of youth -- an image held over from the puritanical crusades of Dr. Frederic Wertham in the 1950s -- it's a fair bet that some will continue to view it as another acceptable exception to First Amendment rights.

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