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Saturday, April 13, 2013 

Manufactured controversy over Apple's possible family-level policy

This was first reported a couple days ago, that Apple was barring Comixology from posting content from Brian Vaughan's Saga #12 because it featured images of homosexuality on it:
The biggest battle in the comic book world this week didn’t involve men in spandex.

It surrounds a pair of relatively small graphic images featuring men decidedly out of costume.

The latest issue of “Saga” — which hit comic book stores Wednesday but not the app on Apple products that usually showcases the series — temporarily banned over two panels depicting graphic images of homosexual sex.

Less than 24 hours after news of the ban broke and ignited outrage in the industry — “Everything we put into the book is there to advance our story, not (just) to shock or titillate, so we're not changing sh--,’ “Saga” writer Brian K. Vaughan said in a statement Tuesday — the company behind the app issued an apology and a reversal of he ban.

“As a partner of Apple, we have an obligation to respect its policies for apps and the books offered in apps,” Comixology CEO David Steinberger said in a statement. “Based on our understanding of those policies, we believed that Saga #12 could not be made available in our app, and so we did not release it today.
If Apple's got a family-friendly policy, and homosexuality isn't considered appropriate subject for children any more than mature heterosexual sex scenes, then good grief, what Vaughan's problem anyway? He isn't setting a very good example if he's going to answer with profanity, and I'm not taking his defense of "advance" at face value either.

Salon/Pacific Standard had a funny way of describing this:
The images in question? Two postage-stamp-sized images of explicit (but not, by any means, erotic) gay sex.
Umm, if they were explicit, then I think every parent who'd like to get their content from a child-friendly site can confirm this isn't what they'd want their child to see, nor would they want it to set an example for their kids.

The New Statesman had the gall to ignore any family-friendly policies altogether, condemning it as "homophobic". Oh, do tell us about it.

The Comixology CEO said it was really because of their intepretation of Apple's policies. Even if they're not as strict now as they were when Steve Jobs was around, the company's assumptions weren't for bad reasons, certainly not if their affiliates want the store to be family friendly. Obviously, this is just another dopey controversy whose manufacturers don't care if the company was trying to make their content something that parents would be more comfy with.

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All I can say is that Saga sounds like a waste of time. This just confirms it.

Plus Vaughn has never been one to hide his moonbattery in the pages of his comics. There was some anti-conservative elements in Runaways, Y: The Last Man demonized conservative women and now we got this crap.

Ugh. I'm sure Apple will cave eventually. I'm sick of the 'anything but kiddie porn and death threats' interpretation of the 1st Amendment, which didn't even attain major acceptance until the 50s-60s. Before then and even in some jurisdictions after, crap like this and other soft porn crud we see even in Marvel titles wouldn't have seen the light of day. And then there was the Code on top of that...No rational person can say we're better off with this (%&$ now. I remember some old Valiant books with very explicit stuff, and I quit buying them because of it.

But I guess I'm just a religious fanatic, homophobe, woman-hater, reason- hater and all those other BS buzzwords.

Yes, the terrifying 'C-word.' Cens...oh, it's too horrible for me to even say. We had it on porn throughout most of American history and it wasn't some soul- crushing destroyer of culture. If anything, the 'anything goes' attitude is. Just because somebody can occasionally misapply a law doesn't mean it should never exist. We wouldn't have murder laws if that were so.

And the lame 'don't like it, don't buy it' doesn't work either. You still have d-bags buying this garbage and society (yes, the forbidden s-word) pays. You can't even go to a fricking gas station without being assaulted by this stuff. A sane country would send it back to the back alleys where it belongs.

I wish some town or county would have the guts to try it, although they'd be sued to death by ACLU, the Freedom from Brains Foundation, Hamilton Burger and everybody else. The Walking Glands shall stagger on.

I think we're all missing the point here.

After all it was the full frontal nudity, especially the homosexual and other psychosexual deviant kind, that made Smallville and Batman Brave and Bold such huge successes.

And the absence of normal family values in both those shows is another big reason why the comicbook versions of the characters sell literally ten to twenty times as much as the television show audience numbers.

Oh wait.

Right, I believe that too. They drive away kids and women and conservatives, and all they have left are hipsters and old hippies. Just made me consider some related issues.

It's pathetic that we have this PC garbage polluting society. The only people who read modern comics from the Big Two are the hardcore liberal fanboys who will buy the comics no matter what, and they'll buy this kind of garbage, too.

Oh, and lest I forget: Pride of Baghdad. Anti-war propaganda set in Iraq disguised as a story about lions. Ugh.

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  • From Jerusalem, Israel
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