The Four Color Media Monitor

CBR's written about a new comic by leftist writer Brian Vaughan, titled Spectators, which is supposed to comment on societal double-standards of how there's desensitiztion to violence, and oversensitization to sex:

There was a fascinating (and depressing) stat that I saw the other day that said something like 1 in every 15 Americans has witnessed a mass shooting. That's shocking, but it also cuts down to the very real fact that that means that 93% of Americans have NEVER witnessed a mass shooting, and that speaks to the way that horrible acts of violence are still truly seen as something that happens to OTHER people by most Americans, and as a result, society is still extremely desensitized to it. Meanwhile, multiple governments around the world are working to restrict access to pornography, or, even more chillingly, stretching the definition of "pornography" to allow them to attack people whose lives don't fit into their ideas of what is "acceptable" in society.

That is the backdrop of Spectators, a new graphic novel that contrasts our desensitization in regard to violence against our oversensitive approach to erotica.

I'll admit it's surprising/amazing somebody as leftist as Vaughan is would want to address a valid topic like this, but it doesn't mean he's willing to acknowledge leftists can do bad things, potentially worse than rightists can. Yet as the columnist notes, the story, about a woman who'd been murdered at a film theater and became a ghost who watches humans for "entertainment", has some surprising allusions to recent events, whether it was intentional or not:

Val's killer is part of a sort of meme cult called #leaderboard, which is all about killing as many people as possible, as the only tangible legacy for anyone is how many people you've killed. These killers are meme-driven, and it really is chilling when you look at how Charlie Kirk's killers engraved his bullets with memes, and you see how much this sort of thing really doesn't seem that unrealistic.

A key flashback in this story is to when Val was a kid and her father let her watch The Terminator with him at her dad's post-divorce, sad single dad apartment, and he covers her eyes during the sex scene, but lets her see all the violence. It makes the sex scene such a big deal to her that she finds a way to steal her dad's VHS copy of The Terminator (which, as you might all know, cost a ton of money back in the day) and to hide it at her mom's house, just so she can watch the sex scene. Violence is okay, sex is bad. That's a lesson that we are taught over and over again, and Vaughan and Henrichon take it to an absurd degree as we see the absurdly increasing amounts of violence in the comic paired with the increasingly elaborate sex that is shown, and the comic eventually gets a bit metafictive about the fact that we, in effect, are like the voyeurs to THIS world that the ghosts are to the living. It's interesting stuff.

The premise certainly is, and the point made about the double-standard taken on violence in films like the Terminator is valid, but again, who knows if a writer as leftist as Vaughan is will be honest about how even leftists are capable of violence, as the Charlie Kirk tragedy makes clear? If it turns out Spectators resorts to the cliche of right-wingers being the perpetrators of violent crime, or them being the sole ones retaining a double-standard on the same as opposed to sex, then the argument gets nowhere fast.

The subject was brought up at the same time as the CBC ran a rather hypocritical report on the history of comics censorship to coincide with news about the Alberta province removing sexually explicit books, comics included, from school shelves:

Alberta's revised restrictions on books in schools take aim at works containing explicit images of sexual acts, but it's not the first time the province has banned graphics in the name of protecting children.

In 1954, the province established the Advisory Board on Objectionable Publications to control the sale of comic books and magazines.

The board was developed in response to a "growing outcry from parents, educators, religious leaders and others," to investigate so-called "crime comics" that supposedly inspired undesirable behaviour in kids.

In July of this year, the provincial government issued a ministerial order asking school employees to remove library materials that depict sexual acts, including those contained in a "written passage." That prompted Edmonton Public Schools to assemble a list of 226 books to remove from shelves and classrooms, including well-known works such as The Handmaid's Tale, The Color Purple and The Godfather.

The uproar over the school board's list forced the government to revise its ministerial order to remove "written passage" and add "visual depiction."

The 2nd of the links in this article says 4 GNs featuring LGBTQ material are among the titles Alberta's government wants removed from school libraries, and if that's the only reason for bringing up the whole subject, then the CBC's report is not altruistic. It does give some history of an incident that led to the early 1950s censorship problems though:

In November 1948, anxieties around the impact of comic books grew exponentially when two boys in Dawson Creek, B.C., were taking potshots with a rifle at vehicles passing by when they fatally struck a driver.

The story made national and international headlines, pointing to one major culprit: comic books. A Time magazine story from 1948 described the boys as having "been reading 40 to 50 comic books a week, and apparently what they read they took to heart.

"One evening last month, they acted like characters in their comic strips."

The Crown prosecutor in the case, A.W. McLellan, is reported to have declared he would like to "see a concerted effort to wipe out this weird and horrible literature with which children are filling their heads."

The case was so widely known, American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham would go on to write about it in his 1954 title Seduction of the Innocent, a book that cemented him as a leading critic of comic books and further fuelled the moral panic already taking shape in Canada, according to Wright.

If it matters, I'm not impressed with Wertham, having discovered he reportedly plagiarized material from other researchers and he was an early form of leftist "progressive", not to mention that his sex-negative viewpoint wasn't all that different from what turned up in the past decade, but I get the sad feeling this report's more about downplaying the effects of violent entertainment than in seriously asking whether censors did the right thing to oppose anything even remotely resembling sex in a comic. On which note:

Later that month, the Edmonton Home and School Council began a campaign against "sex and crime-type comics" with support from the British Columbia Parent Teachers' Association and the Alberta Federation of Home and School Associations, according to an Edmonton Bulletin story.

It was around this time that a 10-year-old future prime minister, Brian Mulroney, delivered a "passionate" award-winning speech on the dangers of crime comics, according to John Bell's book Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe.

In 1949, "crime comics" were added to the Canadian Criminal Code under the obscenity clause, where they remained until 2018.

"What's important to note is that the comics that we're talking about, they're not all 'crime comics.' It was a phrase that was used very arbitrarily to pretty much indicate anything that folks found objectionably concerning," said Wright.

"There was a lot of discussion similar to today and hand wringing about, like, what about children … reading these comic books?"

What's telling is how "sex" gets 1st billing while "violence" is substituted with the word "crime" assuming violence was ever a concern at all back in the day. Indeed, why didn't they use the word "violence" to clearly describe what they felt was offensive, and perhaps get their point across more comprehensibly when it comes to physical assault turning up in visual stories? The ambiguity does suggest even back then, something was terribly wrong with the approach to objections over mature themes.

The board's list of major objections included comics that "glorify crime and criminals," ones that present a "distorted, unhealthy and immoral concept of sex and marriage," and comics that "foster prejudice against class, race, creed, and nationality."

"What the board talks a lot about is this idea of what's 'good' and what's 'bad' reading. So, this idea of: what is harmful to children?" said Wright.

"They used this platform of restricting comics because of the fear that it would be harmful to children and then used those powers to really create more broad newsstand monitoring across the whole province until the early 1970s."

Twenty to 25 per cent of all periodicals, including Playboy and Rolling Stone, were removed in the years the board was active, according to Wright.

Seriously, even Rolling Stone was subject to censorship in Canada? As far as I know, that wasn't a porn magazine like Playboy was. One can only wonder if, in sharp contrast to Playboy, Hustler wasn't, and to my knowledge, that was a very smutty magazine. Either way, the board that was set up in Canada didn't improve matters in the long run.

But public opinion of the board waned over two decades. According to Wright, "by the early 1970s, the public appetite was not there for this kind of oversight."

In 1970, Edmonton Journal reporter Barry Craig spent several days studying the practice of censorship in the city. Writing about his research, Craig concluded that "in the end, censorship appears silly.

"The Edmonton police, the Alberta government … and the Objectionable Publications Board are all trying to keep men's minds pure by limiting what they can see in a magazine or read in a book. It is like Don Quixote and his windmills."

The Advisory Board on Objectionable Publications was officially dissolved in 1976 after about three years of being inactive.

Wright points out that historically, Albertans have pushed back. Fast forward to today, Alberta is again seeing governmental oversight in children's reading material and, again, the move is unpopular with many.

What's not clear from these ambiguous reports is whether anybody actually believes LGBT comics, for example, are suitable for children, if explicit books like these belong literally in a children's library, and whether ridding the library of said books, comics or otherwise, literally constitutes censorship when they're available at other venues where they could be found in adult sections, like bookstores. Doesn't that refute the notion censorship is being enacted by the Alberta government?

"A lot of people talk about the censorship of the 1950s as being something that somehow was accepted by people and it was part of a norm. I don't think that that was as true as people say," Wright said.

"One of the things I found in newspaper articles was how much pushback was happening in Calgary, in Edmonton, in Lethbridge, from citizens writing in and saying, 'Why does the board have the right to decide? You know, we should have the right to decide what our children read.'"

Well why does anybody think children have to read about LGBTQ material, and whether that's universally accepted as though it's a norm, or whether parents must consider it inherently acceptable and a role model for children? Or, why isn't any clear defense being mounted from a modern perspective for whether heterosexual romance is something children should learn to appreciate? Interesting they raise the issue of objections to glorifying crime, because in past years, Hollywood, as mentioned before, glamorized violent criminals. And while censorship is bad, does that mean worries over minimization of violent crime in entertainment aren't valid?

The problem with these news articles is that they don't ask whether complaints are valid about what bad influence violent content can have, and whether worries over sex itself, depending on the angle, are exaggerated by contrast, nor whether any double-standards exist and if they should be reevaluated and changed. Again, I have no idea if Vaughan's new comic, Spectators, will be any improvement over some of his earlier efforts, and no telling if the mainstream press in Canada will be willing to ever address similar topics without bias.

Labels: censorship issues, golden calf of LGBT, history, indie publishers, libraries, misogyny and racism, politics, violence