The State of Comics and Censorship

We’ve all been hearing about it. Book bans and challenges have been rising all over the United States in the past few years. 

 

But what about comics? 

 

Comics and graphic novels have always been a flash point for challenges and bans. From Frederick Wertham’s campaign against comics in the fifties to today, comics seem to somehow attract challenges and bans. 

 

It’s Banned Books Week this week, and we’re looking at what’s been happening with comics challenges and bans across the country. 

 

What is Banned Books Week? We asked Betsy Gomez, Assistant Director for Communications and Public Outreach for the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association and Banned Books Week Coordinator for the details. “Initially Banned Books Week was an information campaign, it was, ‘Hey, books are being banned. These are the books being banned. Let's celebrate the right to read!’ In the last few years, as we've seen the spike and challenges occur, we've been shifting the brand more towards the specific issues and the specific impacts of book ban, and how people can address them, how they can respond to them. Last year, we did our first ever day of action during Banned Books Week, which we called Freedom to Read Day. And we're going to be doing that again this year. It will be the last day of Banned Books Week. It's basically asking people to go out and do something, any one thing to support libraries and fight censorship and libraries. But increasingly, we've gone from just information to, ‘this is what you can do about it.’”

 

So here’s what to know. And what you can do. 

 

NUMBERS

 

The American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom, which tracks book challenges and bans around the U.S., recorded that 378 different graphic novels were threatened with bans or challenges in 2023, with a total of 1,020 total censorship attempts. In the last three years, the numbers have seen a huge jump – 2023’s total censorship attempts are twenty times what they were just three years ago in 2020. 

The most challenged graphic novel of this past year was Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, followed by Flamer, by Mike Curato and Let’s Talk About It, by Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan. All three books were in the American Library Association list of the ten overall most challenged books of 2023. Looking at the top ten graphic novels that were challenged last year, it’s easy to see that one of the themes that runs underlies the challenges is queer content. Of the top ten graphic novels, eight of them are by LGBTQIA+ authors and/or have queer characters. 

 

Appeal to kids or teens is clearly another factor in these books. Seven of the titles have been published for kids or teens, while another two have teen characters (as in Craig Thompson’s Blankets) or have been recognized as crossover works for a teen audience (Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer received an Alex Award from the American Library Association, which recognizes books published for adults that have “special appeal to young adults, ages 12 - 18”). 

 

“A lot of the books that have been challenged won a Stonewall Award or an Alex Award from the American Library Association. When a book wins those awards, it gets a small boost of press – and librarians buy those books. My book wouldn’t be challenged so much if it wasn’t in those libraries, discoverable and there to be challenged. I certainly wouldn’t not want to win those awards; but it’s because the Stonewall Awards are queer awards, and the Alex Awards are for adult books that cross over to teens,” says Maia Kobabe, the author of Gender Queer. 

 

Many of these books have been on banned books lists for years. Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home were first challenged by a library in 2006. Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer was the most banned book of the year in 2016; Raina Telgemeier’s Drama hit the list that year in the number two slot. Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer has topped ALA’s list of challenges for all books (not just graphic novels) since 2021: for three years now. 

 

Kelly Jensen, Editor at Book Riot, who reports on book banning and censorship, told me, “Most of the books being challenged are not new books. A lot of them were around when the demographic of people who are complaining were in schools. So you think to yourself, ‘why now?’ And the answer is, because it’s manufactured. If this really was an issue, it would’ve been taken care of. It’s really about the new ability to create panic; you can see how made up it all is. ‘This book was on the shelves five years ago, and you weren’t doing this. Why is that?”

Whatever’s happening, everyone agrees: it’s bad. Graphic novel challenges are going up, and we’re seeing them in bookstores, libraries, and schools, where it’s sometimes so extreme that the police are called to middle schools! 

 

Florida librarian Katharine Kan told me, “I’ve dealt with challenges to materials throughout my forty year career in libraries. I never dreamed it would become this bad.”

 

AUTHORS ON BANNED COMICS

 

I talked to Maia Kobabe, the author of Gender Queer, about eir experience being the author of the most challenged book in the United States for the past three years. “It’s deeply weird,” says Maia. 

 

“It is very frustrating that my book is challenged, and that the language is around it not being appropriate for young people, while the book is about myself as a young person. It’s about the thoughts I had, the questions I had, and the experience I had, up into my mid-twenties. I think if I had been able to read this book as a thirteen or fourteen year old, it would have answered the questions that plagued me about my identity, about my sexuality, about who I was in the world, and about the fact that gender seemed so confusing and I didn’t have any language or role models to emulate what was going on, or to model what I could look forward to into the future.”

 

Maia also finds the challenges frustrating, especially because so many are motivated by homophobia and transphobia. “My book is getting challenged and people will cite specific reasons like this passage or this page, and I think that’s really disingenuous. I think that’s because Moms for Liberty and conservative politicians are trying to erase queer and trans voices, specifically trans voices, from the public sphere. They picked my book, because it’s a comic, because of the title, because it’d won awards from the American Library Association so it was widely available. So in some ways I don’t think it’s about me or my book – it’s about a political agenda of trying to suppress queer voices. It’s about one governor running on parental controls in 2021, and he won. It’s both very personal about me, and then not about me at all.”

 

Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s statement from 2016 when This One Summer was the most banned book of the year, echoes this sentiment. The ALA noted the challenges were, “because it includes LGBT characters, drug use and profanity, and it was considered sexually explicit with mature themes” The Tamakis say, “when we wrote this book, our goal was to create a story that explored the experience of summer and of adults, from a young person’s perspective. We worry about what it means to define certain content, such as LGBTQ content, as being inappropriate for young readers, which implicitly defines readers who do relate to this content, who share these experiences, as not normal, when really they are part of the diversity of young people’s lives.”

 

In an interview with NPR’s Code Switch, Mike Curato says, “I am so scared for my readers. I'm scared for the people I wrote my book for. You know, the ones that live in the communities where these books are being banned are the ones who need it most. I wrote my book, these other authors wrote their books, to help people. These are books that are there to give validation to people's existence. And what these people are saying is that people like [Flamer’s main character] Aiden, people like me, shouldn't exist. I mean, that's basically what it comes down to. When you're saying ‘we can't share that story with children because it's not appropriate,’ that's all very coded language to say, ‘that's not the type of people that we want in this world.’ That action, those words, just prove why books like this need to exist. I mean, those words and actions are just rooted in hatred and prejudice. And, you know, there are a lot of buzz phrases flying around like ‘protecting the children,’ and it's like, ‘you don't actually care about protecting the children because if you cared about protecting all children, you would care about children of color. You would care about queer youth. You would care about girls, women.’”

 

To write this article, I reached out to a number of authors whose graphic novels are on this top ten list. I talked with authors who didn’t have the bandwidth for yet one more interview about their books being banned. I talked to authors who were worried about potential legal responses from censors if they made public statements. There’s a narrative, that for authors, it’s great when a book gets banned, because it means more sales and attention for them and their work. That was not the case for the authors I talked to. 

 

“It was October 2021 when I first heard wind of my book being banned,” said Cathy G. Johnson, whose graphic novel, The Breakaways, is the tenth most banned graphic novel this year. “I am definitely in the camp of not wanting to talk about it – I didn’t want to give fuel to the flame. It’s the best protection from bullies, not letting them see it affect you. Ignoring them. I refused every media request, and I assume that’s why my book isn’t as high on the list as it could be. That’s okay.”

 

Maia Kobabe talks about eir experience: “It’s hard to wrap my head around emotionally. My day-to-day life is much the same. I still live with my parents. I’m sitting here next to my drawing tablet, and when this interview’s done, I’m going to go back to my job, sitting at home in my pajamas drawing all day, listening to podcasts. I just never thought this many people would have any awareness of me or my work, and I don’t think I even have a very accurate perception of how well-known my book is. But it’s not like I’m getting recognized in my day-to-day life. So it’s hard to emotionally process what it’s like for me.”

 

“If one trans person was going to go through this, maybe better it’s me. I live in the liberal Bay Area in California, I have a very supportive family, I have pretty rock solid mental health – I’m doing fine. But it’s frustrating to me what this says about where we are as a country, and the increasing slide into fascism as a nation.”

 

HOW DOES A GRAPHIC NOVEL CHALLENGE WORK?

 

What does it mean for a graphic novel to be challenged? 

 

If you’re like me – or like Maia Kobabe – you probably grew up thinking about book challenges in the context of ‘something the library puts up a poster for every once in a while.’ 

 

Maia Kobabe told me, “I spent so much time in libraries as a young person, I was in a library every week in middle school or high school, I started volunteering for the library in high school and worked in my university library for teen years. I started seeing Banned Books displays in libraries when I was young – I was probably in junior high. And I remember seeing those posters and thinking, ‘this is wild, who would ban a book?’ When I started paying attention, one of the most challenged series was the Harry Potter series. My memory of these displays when I was a young person, it was a lot of really well-known books: it was Harry Potter, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Bible. I don’t think I had any concept of what a challenge entailed for the community – my perception was that some people were challenging best-sellers.

 

Dan Patton, adult librarian at a public library in metro Detroit, Michigan, and an outgoing co-chair of the American Library Association’s Graphic Novel and Comics Roundtable’s Addressing Challenges to Comics Committee, walked me through what challenges in libraries are like right now, and what it means for a graphic novel to get challenged. “A challenge could be a piece of paper; it could be people shaking their fist right in front of you; it could be people throwing a book at you; stealing a book, damaging a book; complaining to the board; all these physical, harmful words and actions that we face as public-facing municipal workers. We found all this stuff happening around the country.”

 

The ALA’s Graphic Novel and Comics Roundtable is a professional organization that supports librarians all over North America; they have more than 1,000 members. They created the Addressing Challenges to Comics Committee to help librarians all around the country dealing with attempts to remove graphic novels from the library. Patton describes their work, “At the committee, we did one of the largest sweeping surveys of librarians and their relationships to challenges. We wanted to get input from librarians across the country and their experience with book challenges. In response to that, we created a toolkit that gave step-by-step information about how to respond to challenges. Before a challenge, creating policies that are rigorous; during a challenge, interacting with your administrators and communities; and after a challenge, what you do for your library and yourself to cope with that. 

 

Eti Berland, School Engagement Librarian, and co-chair of the GNCRT’s Addressing Challenges committee says, “ALA’s Association for Library Services to Children has created a toolkit for challenges inspired by the GNCRT toolkit – we’re all working together. When we band together and stand together, we end up preserving the right to read, and that’s awesome. ”

 

Patton adds, “We have an ongoing education mission. Two years ago, we did a set of webinars with librarians and comics creators, bringing forward these issues in a public space. Most recently, we hosted a zine project where we put out a call for folks to create their own zines about experiences with challenges and experiences with censorship, and freedom to read. We had about thirty submissions in a month, and we hosted those zines at the Zine Pavilion at the ALA Annual conference. The ongoing mission is to be on the pulse of what’s happening, and to offer space for people to communicate about it, and advocate. We don’t deal directly with challenges – the Office of Intellectual Freedom does that. We deal with the individual librarians – sometimes those folks need help, or someplace to talk about this. That’s where we are.”

 

Berland says, “The committee is very open to what the members want to do. There are thirteen people on the committee, and we have a liaison from the Graphic Novel and Comics Roundtable. We have school librarians, we have public librarians, academic librarians – we can all leverage our own communities, and take our resources and bring them into our own communities.”

 

Betsy Gomez at ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom walked me through her organization’s role. “You can report censorship incidents to the Office of Intellectual Freedom. An OIF Staffer will get back in touch and help you kind of navigate that censorship incident. We're here to support librarians who are in need of help with censorship issues, privacy issues, and ethics issues related to librarianship. And any report that’s sent to OIF is kept confidential. We use the information that we gather to create the kind of data that we share during National Library Week, to help people understand the scope of censorship and libraries around the country (as we've seen in recent years, the U.S. has seen a sharp spike in that), and OIF offers advice. We work with a sister organization, the Freedom to Read Foundation, who can help with legal representation when it's a first amendment issue, and we work with other members of the ecosystem of intellectual freedom organizations to facilitate support within communities through our Unite Against Book Bans initiative. Through other initiatives like Banned Books Week, we shine a spotlight on censorship issues, and how people can help defend libraries from them.”

 

As well as the nationwide library organization, some state library associations have their own groups to address challenges and bans. Katherine Kan, the librarian and graphic novel selector at the Bay County Library in Panama City, Florida is also a member of the Intellectual Freedom Committee for the Florida Library Association. “We are from all over the state; we meet via zoom once a month. At the Florida Library Association conference, our committee hosted a roundtable discussion on book banning issues, which was well-attended and helped people talk out some of the things they were going through,” she told me. 

 

She also talked to me about challenges she’s seen at her library, and what her library is doing to make sure books stay on the shelf. “We have had some complaints. Our director was proactive several years ago and has worked with the county board that oversees our library system and got them to approve a very robust policy for what to do if you want to question a book’s inclusion in the system. It’s a very tough process – you can’t just say ‘I don’t want you to have that.’ You have to prove you’ve read the book, you can only do one book per form, and once the book goes for review, if it’s not removed from the collection, no one else can challenge it for three years. All the staff have undergone training on how to respond verbally to people saying, ‘that’s a terrible book, why do you have it on the shelf?’ We have talking points, we can always refer back to our director if our patron is getting angrier so we don’t escalate the situation, and we even did role-playing on how you respond and how do you remain calm in facing a situation like that. I actually have a lot of the books in our collection that are getting challenged and removed around the state – including Gender Queer. I have two copies! And it circulates!”

 

Cassy Lee, teacher librarian and comics MFA grad student at CCA, walked me through a challenge to Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer that she experienced at her school library. 

 

“In September of 2022, it was my second year being at this school and tenth year of being a librarian. I had always really promoted the ALA’s Banned Book Week as a way to bring up these issues of censorship that have been happening and were very much on the rise in 2022. I always have a student group, my library nerds – it’s a library advisory group. We had this big discussion, and they really were interested in and really grappling with the issues and the complexity of them. One of them really wanted to not only have a display, but have the reasons why these books were banned in different places, and she went through and found the reasons and put them on the covers to establish this display as a starting point for conversations. And boy did it start conversations!”

 

The weekend after the display went up, the school board had a meeting in the library. Lee says, “One of the members of the board saw the display and fired off an email to our head of school and said that we were giving minors access to graphic books in the library. The principal emailed me that night and I saw it and said, ‘whoa, okay – here we go. Gird the loins, it’s happening!’ Even being ten years into my career, I had never experienced a challenge in my life. I have a good relationship with my principal, so I felt comfortable talking to him about it. He asked me to write up what I would respond and to send it to him. I wrote up a response and tried to ground it in historical context of banned books week, how it was involving students, and then went into the particular concern, our selection policy and how it’s based in favorable reviews from recognized journals, and really went to bat for this book and how it’s really recommended for people who want to understand that journey and identity. And really then addressed the board member’s claim that it was sexually explicit content – which is about the intent to arouse, and if you read Gender Queer that is absolutely not the purpose of those pages that people always point to, and it’s absolutely not the point of the book. I let them know that we try to have a balanced collection that represents many identities. As students come in as rising ninth graders, we let them know that the collection includes books with mature content, and we leave those decisions with the students – we trust them to know their own values and discern for themselves what they’re ready for. If they see something they’re not ready for, they have that choice to put it back. None of the books on the display were required reading.”

 

The administration had her back. “The principal was so supportive,” Lee said. “He thought it was a fantastic response, he sent it off. He really handled it – he had done his research too. We had sat down and met in his office, he’d looked up articles about Gender Queer. He trusted me as a professional and trusted everything I said and had brought receipts on. ALA and librarians have fought for that freedom to read for a long time, and he backed me up 100%. This isn’t a super dramatic story, but that’s what you hope for.”

 

Some challenges go beyond emails and staff meetings. 

 

Jeff Trexler, the Interim Executive Director at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, told me, “I’ve been reached out to by district attorneys, sheriffs, law enforcement from around the country, who don’t understand why these books are being challenged, and people are trying to get teachers or librarians arrested for making certain books available, and want to know, should we arrest librarians, should we arrest teachers, should we arrest retailers.” 

 

I was very relieved to hear his next statement: “Right now we’re at a 100% success rate on that, no arrests in any conversations we’ve been involved in.”

 

CHALLENGES IN LIBRARIES

 

Public and school libraries have been the primary battleground for this latest wave of book challenges. 

 

Kelly Jensen says, “When libraries made the intentional move to add more comics to the collection, we really saw a spike in book bans of comics in libraries, and that was the early 2000s. That era of intentionally creating comics collections, and having more comics available for young people, that became a whole thing to get mad about.”

 

“I do want to point out how much it is affecting the lives of children and their communities,” says Cathy G. Johnson, about the challenges The Breakaways has received. “It was just last month a librarian in a neighborhood I was visiting mentioned that someone on their library board tried to ban my book, and my book was defended, and it remained in the library. And it all happened without me knowing. So I think it’s beneficial to point out that there are probably a lot of fights happening outside of our purview. But the fight isn’t about me and my book, and it never has been – it’s for the rights of children to exist safely in their communities. And I’m very grateful for everyone who fights for kids.”

 

Some challenges are for single titles – and some go beyond that. Jeff Trexler says, “We started getting reports where schools were removing all graphic novels, including Marvel and DC, from their libraries, because there’s an assumption that graphic novels are inherently sexual in nature. We’ve seen manga removed wholesale from schools. We’ve seen attempts for graphic novels to be placed behind the circulation desk and only accessed by showing an ID or permission from an adult. Some of it’s concerned about content, but a lot of it’s about the medium.”

 

As more and more major publishers are signing up graphic novels, the format’s presence in public libraries and school libraries is growing – giving new populations of readers access to comics. But with that change, there’s an adjustment period that libraries and librarians are struggling to navigate. 

 

I talked to Tasslyn Magnusson, Senior Consultant with the Freedom to Read team for PEN America, about what she’s seeing. “I hear about the librarians who will hide their graphic novels periodically, because they think that kids should read real books. Then there are people who are not purchasing, or whose purchases have gotten frozen. Or with the path to purchasing, the school district says that you have to put the books on review, publicly, for thirty days to get so many sign-offs or reviews from parents. I think it’s making librarians choose the simpler path, and not being as comfortable trying new things.” 

 

Magnusson talks to a lot of librarians who are taking the rise in challenges very seriously. “In general, people operate from a space of fear right now,” she told me. “They’re afraid of the loud parents, the loud community, and they’re afraid of losing their job. And in some states, if the state hasn’t made distributing sexual content a felony, they’re working very hard to do so. It’s a dangerous time, and I can understand being afraid. But we need them not to be afraid. 

 

Kelly Jensen is seeing the same thing as an impetus for ‘soft censorship,’ where libraries shy away from buying graphic novels with potentially controversial content. “No one is operating as their best selves, because they’re all in fight-or flight mode. Decisions of soft censorship are coming from ‘oh shit, I need to save my job,’ or ‘oh shit, I need health insurance, I need to live.’ At the end of the day, we know it’s readers who lose on that.”

 

When dealing with a challenge in her community, Eti Berland said, “It was amazing to see people come together and support the library and speak up and speak out.” She also told me, “There are a lot of things that aren’t in the news coverage – the effects on my coworkers, the harassment they experienced, trauma and toxicity. For me, it helped me become stronger in my determination that book access was at the forefront of my work, and preparing for that and ensuring that they stay on the shelf.”

 

For Berland, dealing with a challenge made her more dedicated. But I also heard many stories of a chilling effect, where librarians were worried about buying and stocking comics and graphic novels because of the challenges happening and the community response. Tasslyn Magnusson told me, “I hear about the librarians who will hide their graphic novels periodically, because they think that kids should read real books. Then there are people who are not purchasing, or whose purchases have gotten frozen. Or with the path to purchasing, the school district says you have to put the books on review, publicly, for thirty days to get so many sign-offs or reviews from parents. I think it’s making librarians choose the simpler path, and not being as comfortable trying new things.”

 

After dealing with a challenge to Gender Queer in her library, Cassy Lee looked back on the experience. “While the issue was resolved, the deeper conversation didn’t continue. Another emotion I felt was fear – ‘are they going to come back with a whole big list of books they want to ban in the library?’ I was reading about Amanda Jones getting death threats and all these wild, terrifying things. If that happened, how would I respond? I haven’t experienced that, but it has kept me from wanting to share this story. Only now that I’ve left this school, I’m feeling comfortable with sharing it. You worry about backlash, getting fired, and getting attacked. Kudos to the librarians who are able to do that in the positions they’re in and stand their ground – it’s scary, and really hard.”

 

Maia Kobabe says, “As terrible as it is to remove a book from a library shelf, it’s worse that librarians are being harassed at work, are being threatened online, are being stalked, called the most horrendous names, are being fired from their jobs, or in some cases having to quit due to literal fear of their safety and for their family. It’s been this ripple effect of violence, fear, and persecution specifically against librarians, but also against teachers, and it feels unfair and scary, and it’s going to drive people who are entering these jobs that are about public service out of their homes, and sometimes out of their cities and states. That’s what I find the most reprehensible about this.”

 

HISTORY TO TODAY

 

We all know the history. In 1954, Frederic Wertham wrote Seduction of the Innocent, and his book led to congressional hearings for the comics industry, and a national panic over the four-color offerings on the newsstands.

 

Betsy Gomez, Assistant Director for Communications and Public Outreach for the Office for Intellectual Freedom at the American Library Association says, “I think a lot of the contemporary attitudes about comics can be directly tied to Wertham's work. If you read Wertham's work and you read the language that was used around comics in the 1950s, it sounds so much like the language is being used now to ban books. So Wertham attacks comics. The comics industry reacts by passing the comics code, and as a result you had a dilution of the types of material that was being published. You had a dilution of mature comics, because comics were actually getting pretty mature at the time, since it was growing with the audience. And so you have a dilution of the audience; the Comics Code narrowed down the scope of what comics was capable of, and you ended up in a lot of ways with this very standardized stuff that was appropriate for an eleven-year-old kid, and a lot of it was mostly superheroes. The comics code was in force for decades, and it made comics collapse in on itself to certain types of genres and certain types of content. Those fed into these kinds of misconceptions that we still have today: that comics are for kids. That comics can't cover mature topics. That you can't have sex in comics. We're still undoing the damage, the comics code, even though the Comics Code has been gone since 2011. Even though nobody was using it that much towards the end, it did lasting damage.”

 

Carol Tilley, Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois, connects comics challenges, social movements, and politics. “The late 1940s to the mid 1950s, comics as a medium was under attack by a large variety of groups, but at the same time there were a lot of challenges and concerns related to books in general, especially books that might seem sympathetic to communism in the U.S. So there were a sizeable number of upheavals in the library world more generally, questions around what kind of ideas people should have access to and what’s appropriate. All of this is taking place at the same time, though comics is what we remember most. All of this is around the idea of control – who controls access: should it be the government, should it be citizens groups, should it be the library board? Who has the access to decide? Around this time, there was also the question of if librarians should have the authority to decide what was in their collections. What we’re seeing today is a giant rhyme for what took place in the mid twentieth century. The larger conversation is really similar in that it’s about what kinds of conversations can we permit as a community and as a country. What ideas are relevant to that, whether it’s ideas about sexuality or ideas about political ideology – those were concerns in the mid 20th century and they’re concerns today. . . . Those are still big ideas we’re wrestling with, ideas and topics that challenge the larger mythology of who we are as a nation.”

 

Then came the 1980s, when comics stores started popping up all over the country – and people started seeing comics in new spaces. Challenges came along with them. 

 

Jeff Trexler, Interim Executive Director at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, says, “One of the key factors in the rise of comics censorship, in the 1980s when the CBLDF was formed, was the rise of the comic bookstore. Comics went from something people found in the drug store and on the newstand that had the Comics Code seal and the anodyne Superman. The notion was that comics were for kids and were somewhat safe. Now you had this blend of alt and underground comics and mainstream comics in shopping malls or strip malls, or on main streets. Now there was a change in environment, and comics were being sold, available for kids as well as adults, from these new retailers. There was a twenty year period then when the CBLDF was heavily involved in defending retailers, as people were trying to keep the spread of adult comics out of the community, to the extent of even sending some people to jail. But over time, there’s a consensus that emerges, and people came to realize that most of the material in these comics shops weren’t pornography. People started seeing that images are central to everything that we do, especially because of the internet.” 

 

In the last twenty years, there’s been another change in the market, as comics are becoming part of collections in public and school libraries, and being stocked on the shelves at bookstores. 

 

Jeff Trexler says, “At the same time as comics were going mainstream, comics were spreading not just to comics shops, but also to education and schools. You’d see them in libraries, you’d see displays in libraries, you’d see massive graphic novel and manga sections, you’d see teachers starting to use them in schools. For a while, this went unnoticed by parents, because most parents don’t notice what kids are doing in schools. Then during the pandemic, when kids were doing all their interactions on Zoom at the home, where the parents could also see, and then the parents are seeing images from Gender Queer and various LGBTQIA+ graphic novels, and My Friend Dahmer. And they’re seeing this and they’re going, ‘wait, this wasn’t what I had when I was a kid.’ It stirred up the same kind of fear that people had towards retailers in the 1980s, and drug stores and newsstands and churches in the 1950s.”

 

And now it’s today: comics are everywhere. But they’re not accepted or understood by everyone, and this growth and the existence of the format in a new space is a primary factor in the challenges we’re now seeing. 

 

CHANGES IN OUR CULTURE CAUSE FEAR OVER COMICS

 

“Books with civil rights themes are so central to what’s been going on in the past four years.” says CBLDF Interim Executive Director Jeff Trexler. “We’re in the midst of a battle over how America depicts itself, and how America represents itself. Graphic novels are an incredibly democratic way for anyone to show their own story, and their own life, which can be accessed by people from all sorts of different backgrounds.” 

 

“Comics and graphic novels are an outlet that can give voice to marginalized people, and are easier to get into for authors than the standard publishing world is. Before challenges started happening, we saw a lot of memoirs, people telling the story of their lives and their struggles,” says Dan Patton. 

 

Kelly Jensen, Editor at Book Riot, who has been reporting and tracking this latest wave of censorship says, “Comics have been, since the beginning, more diverse than the average calendar of novels. They’ve been a target because they’re a queer format and they invite queerness into them – that queerness isn’t just in sexuality, it’s in everything. In general, they’ve been more diverse, and that puts a target on the back of comics, a format that people don’t understand or want to understand.”

 

Jeff Trexler points to the major changes in LGBTQIA+ rights as a significant factor in these challenges. “When I was in law school, there was a ruling that you could be thrown into jail for being gay. The Supreme Court reverses that decision, and says it’s protected, people with different sexual identities enjoy equal protection under the law, by the 14th amendment – it’s a Constitutional right. When we have the recognition that people who are previously excluded from the public square are now part of the public square, we want to picture that. So we’re now finding graphic novels in schools, in classes, and they’re talking about these issues, showing these issues, engaging these issues in all sorts of media. We’ve ended up in something of a battle of how this new aspect of American civil life is going to be shown, depicted, and expressed, in schools and libraries in the public square. Other than anti-pornography laws, and all sorts of  restrictions of what you can or cannot show in public, American hasn’t historically had standards, norms, or best practices of visually depicting sexual identities or sexual expression. So we’re working that stuff out.”

 

Betsy Gomez says, “Libraries have in a lot of regards been pulled into the same culture war that's happening in schools. The same groups that are attacking education are attacking libraries. We've seen this over and over. This is an organized campaign. These are groups are misrepresenting themselves as, you know, parents rights groups, or groups that are grassroots, when a lot of them are very well funded by political interests that would like to see LGBTQIA+ people and the experiences of people of color erased from a lot of public spaces. And so it's part of that kind of larger trend of attacking public institutions, and eroding faith in those institutions.”

 

The world has changed, and comics are excellent at representing it – but not everyone has accepted those changes. Kelly Jensen says, “Comics are a good microcosm of what’s going on now, and a reminder that this has been going on since the beginning. The more the books reflect what the world actually is, the more panic there is that the world isn’t actually this white, cis-gendered, heterosexual Christian ideal.” 

 

“It’s just not.”

 

COMICS! FOR KIDS! & PARENTS DON’T GET IT. 

 

With the explosion of new graphic novels for kids, after years of the comics industry working to educate parents that ‘bam pow, comics are for kids now,’ this flood of challenges demonstrates that there’s still significant education work to do. 

 

Tasslyn Magnusson says, “As graphic novels became more highly regarded and a part of mainstream children’s literature, they also became much more susceptible to attack.” And PEN’s report shows that book bans in schools are rising. 

 

“I worked defending comics from bans for more than twenty years, and I still run into people who talk about, ‘You know my kid loves comics. But I really want my kid to read prose, because comics are just like, you know, not real books or not real reading.’ And they are real reading. So we're still dealing with that,” says Betsy Gomez about her work with the American Library Association. 

 

“People care so deeply about their kids, and making sure they grow up to be readers,” Eti Berland told me. “Kids who read comics read all the things. We know that kids who read comics read tons of comics, and they’re getting that book volume and growing reading comprehension and fluency. If kids read comics, they’re going to love reading, and if they love reading, everything else will come with it.”

 

Betsy Gomez agrees. “Comics are hugely popular with kids. And so I'm sure that no small part of book banning today is also that kind of fear we have of the things that kids love. We've seen that over and over and over over the years. In the fifties, kids loved comics. Then comics must have been causing juvenile delinquency, according to a person who made up data. And then we saw it with heavy metal, and we saw it with video games. And so we keep seeing that kind of fear of the media the kids engage with and really embrace and love. Reading is reading. You know that comics are valid reading.”

 

But many parents don’t know that. Jeff Trexler told me that in some of the challenges the CBLDF defended, he found, “there was the critique that graphic novels were subliterate, that the very nature of reading images wasn’t engaged with real reading, and real literacy, and that every minute you spend on a graphic novel in school was a minute less to spend on real reading and learning.”

 

“It is the parents’ job to tell their kids what they can or can’t read,” says Kelly Jensen. But many parents seem lost when faced with a format they didn’t read growing up themselves. Jensen told me, “The parents are responsible for their children. So when their children do something they don’t agree with, they panic – they’ve lost control. The reality is, you can’t control a young person’s exposure to everything in the world. So it’s your job to set those bumpers up that you’ve decided are appropriate, and trust that your kid is going to listen to them, or – if they pick something up that’s out of bounds – to close that thing up. Kids are not little robots, so if you’re blaming librarians or educators here, that’s a reflection of you not accepting that your kid is growing up.

 

Tasslyn Magnusson is seeing the same thing, especially with manga, which many parents today didn’t read growing up. “There’s also the idea that manga exists, and that it’s dangerous and foreign. There’s an element of manga that people don’t understand, and they react with fear, and then hate. Parents and guardians don’t understand, and they don’t ask. Because we’re in this path where the first choice is to protest, rather than to talk about it with your child, parents end up in these much more extreme positions than they might’ve taken. There also are a lot of racist, homophobic, horrible people out there who feel more emboldened every day to express their thoughts.”

 

Children and teenagers reading adult graphic novels came up frequently in my conversations about factors that can cause challenges. 

 

“Two years ago, I had encountered at least one challenge to one of Art Spiegelman’s graphic novels that was in the library’s adult oversized books collection,” Dan Patton told me. “A younger person had grabbed the book off the shelf when their parent wasn’t with them. If you’ve read any Art Spiegelman, you know it was adult material. This person submitted a challenge to the library. However, it was built into that library’s policy that you had to be a resident of the community to request a challenge, so it was thrown out. That’s when I started learning about challenges in libraries, and how to make them more rigorous to see if they’re worthwhile, relevant, and something to be taken seriously. I saw other challenges where one person was upset about something, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is upset, or that their claim was legitimate.”

 

Katharine Kan says, “We did have one particular situation that never got to the point of being a full challenge. I have some of the Kingsmen graphic novels from Image Comics. A mom came in with one of her teen daughters. One of them went through the second Kingsmen graphic novel, and there’s one panel where one of the male characters is there in all of his full frontal nudity glory. The mom set up a huge fuss. Our director got called in to talk to her because she started screaming and cursing at the staff. Basically, the response was, ‘ma’am, your children. They’re teens. This is an adult section of the library. These materials are perfectly fine for our audience in this department. If you don’t want your teens to be looking at these books, you’re free to take them to the young adult room.’” 

 

Some libraries are responding to concerns over future challenges by relocating the comics. Kelly Jensen told me, “In Garfield County, Colorado – they were getting complaints about their manga in the teen section, so they moved them all to the adult section. So now the teens are just going to go to the adult area, which doesn’t solve the problem at all.”

 

Maia Kobabe spoke to the confusion that readers are now having with the lines between comics for younger readers and adults, “Some people in the public do not understand the concept of a comic for adults. I’ve had challenges where they literally called my comic ‘a picture book.’ Because my drawing style is cartoony, which is how you fit a whole human body and enough space for a speech bubble in a panel, people say that my drawings look like children, including the sex scene, which is between two consenting adults. I’m like, ‘please, have reading comprehension, oh my god.’”

 

That lack of understanding of comics art is pervasive. Betsy Gomez says, “The misconceptions that happen when somebody looks at a book like Gender Queer, and they see the art style, and they infer that it must be for kids, because their art style looks juvenile to them. And that's not the case. You know it, and Gender Queer is not the only book where you see that and they can parlay these ideas into the talking points they use, attacking graphic novels in particular about their appropriateness for younger audiences and talking about how these books harm kids. Graphic novels are an easy target because there are pictures they can point to, because they didn't read the material.”

 

Eti Berland sees the same thing with librarians she works with for the GNCRT’s Addressing Challenges Committee. “Even the word ‘graphic’ raises peoples’ hackles. And they don’t necessarily know that they have that bias. Because the books are colorful, and can be playful, people don’t realize they also can be complicated.”

 

COMICS ARE BEING TARGETED

 

“It feels different to see something visually than to read it and picture it in your mind,” says Maia Kobabe.

 

People react to images in ways they just don’t with text. And comics are full of images. 

 

Jeff Trexler says, “We’re seeing some things happen that spoke to the reaction of the changing role of comics in twenty-first century life, and the role of comics in twenty-first century literacy.”

“I do think that comics draw extra scrutiny in the sense that it's very easy for people to flip through a comic and find something offensive because there are pictures there,” says Betsy Gomez. “What we're seeing right now are a couple of comics that are the banner titles for the people who are organizing these campaigns against certain types of material and libraries. Books like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe or Flamer by Mike Curato have been held up as these examples of things that shouldn't be in libraries when, in fact, they they're valid literature, and they deserve to be in libraries, and there's an audience for them, and there's a demand for them.”

 

Dan Patton told me, “Because it’s visual, it’s so much easier to access. That’s one of the reasons I went toward comics – I was a slow reader, and I didn’t have to struggle reading the words on the page. That accessibility can be for anyone.”

 

“Comics are a format, and they're a format that requires some understanding of how the format works, because it's not just prose. And it's not just pictures,” says Betsy Gomez. “It's this sum that's greater than the parts. I like to think that my understanding of comics as a format and as an art form informs how we talk to people about defending them when they're challenged. You know, understanding that the misconceptions about comics that are still pervasive. That comics are not valuable literature, that they're just for kids, or they're too mature for kids. Or, you know, it's just superheroes.”

 

Maia Kobabe spoke to the power the image has in the internet era, and the complexity it’s added to challenges today. “It’s much easier to take a screenshot or a picture of a page and have it go viral than text. There are a couple of pages from my book that are always flagged; one of them is the blowjob-dildo scene, you will be shocked to hear. There’s a clip online from when Ron DeSantis was doing a red-vs-blue debate versus Gavin Newsom; Ron DeSantis had a photocopy of that page from my book and then censored it with big pieces of black electrical tape which made the things being censored look much larger than they were. And he’d folded up that photocopy and kept it in the breast pocket of his suit, and in the middle of the debate pulled it out of his jacket, this low-res black and white photocopy of my book. And it’s because of the visuals; because he thought the visuals were damning in and of themselves. I don’t think he would’ve done that with text. Comics are always a little more vulnerable to challenges, because people can flip through them and find the page they disagree with without reading the book.”

 

Jeff Trexler sees the same thing as an impetus for the challenges the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund addresses. He told me, “A parent in Fairfax County, VA saw a Zoom meeting of a hearing in Texas, and the parent had the brilliant idea of showing the most inflammatory passages from Gender Queer and showing them on Twitter, in freeze frames, and people realized you could get thousands of likes, and all this online attention. If you were a politician, you could get juice for your campaign and inflame your community by showing these images online, on Twitter, on YouTube, on Instagram, on TikTok, and that these images packed a punch, more so than reading a text passage. These things started going viral nationwide.”

 

“It’s the same kind of topics that are being challenged with traditional novels, but the visual element makes it so easy for people to share it online and cause panic, because of course anyone’s going to be jarred when they see a nude image presented to them with no context,” says Kelly Jensen. 

 

Both the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund pointed to the differences in challenges for graphic novels and prose as a clear sign these two formats are being treated differently. Jeff Trexler said, “there were challenges to text versions of books, but also to graphic novels – and the graphic novel would be restricted, but the text version could stay. This spoke to the perceived power of the image, and the impact it had on children.”

 

“You know, we can say, ‘it's just the pictures, dummy,’ Betsy Gomez told me. “But that's not the only thing. It's not just the pictures. We've seen on more than a few occasions the graphic novel version of a classic novel being banned, but the classic novel remains. A prime example is The Handmaid’s Tale. The graphic novel gets banned. The prose novel does not – or the graphic novel adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank. There is still a pervasive view amongst some administrators and individuals and communities that see comics as not as valuable as prose. And it's something that we've been chipping away at. But it's something I still encounter.”

 

Some challenges are going even further. Jeff Trexler told me, “We found things with respect to certain graphic novels where there was an assumption that the impact of them on children’s mental health was more deleterious; because images are more vivid, they packed more emotional power. Certain graphic novels couldn’t go back into the school district until they had enough mental health counselors to address the mental health concerns of any child who would read the graphic novels.”

 

Maia Kobabe expressed the frustration that all of the people I talked to clearly felt, saying, “reading about a tough topic like the Holocaust or the history of race in this country – one of the best ways you can encounter that is in a book. It’s gentler than a documentary, or reading about it on the internet. It’s more researched, more cited, a more factual depiction of what it is. That is the best way to encounter this type of information. It’s so frustrating that these conservative groups are banning these books that are most needed, and erase them from public access.”

 

BOOK BANS AND POLITICS

 

Challenges are happening in public libraries and school libraries – but this fight is also happening outside the library. It’s happening in courtrooms, statehouses, and even in Congress. 

 

“Very not-common-sense laws are putting people in bad positions, and they’re putting people in bad positions. It’s costing people money, time, their livelihoods – it’s costing communities their education, their entertainment, and wasting their tax dollars. And this is happening all over the country. The south gets a lot of focus because there’s a lot of stigma there, but there are people all over the country trying to restrict freedoms.” says Dan Patton. 

 

“This is where Moms for Liberty started. I’m up in the panhandle in northwestern Florida; they’re down on the Atlantic coast of the peninsula,” Katharine Kan told me. “Florida’s an interesting state, because we have a Republican governor, a lot of my area is extremely, extremely Republican and right-wing. There are other parts of the state that I thought were more Democratic and liberal, but that is where these people started and took root, and just started taking over PTAs and school organizations, and got supported by the state government. A lot of it has to do with the government supporting them.”

 

“At this point, people who are challenging books, like Moms for Liberty, are keyword searching for topics they don’t like, like abortion, sex ed, history of racism, and every queer topic, and they’re just challenging everything that falls into those topic categories. It’s about silencing the speech of those specific groups, and silencing the conversations around those topics,” says Maia Kobabe. 

 

At times it’s even ridiculous. Dan Patton told me, “Idaho had passed a law that the adult materials were supposed to be a certain distance away from the children’s materials. So this one very small library, to comply with the law, was forced to become an eighteen-plus library, because they didn’t have enough space to keep the children’s books away from the adult books. The only way children and teenagers could go into the library was if they were accompanied by a parent or had a written admission form.”

 

The library in Patmos, Michigan was defunded in 2022 because library staff refused to remove Gender Queer, Tillie Walden’s Spinning, and Colleen AF Venable and Ellen Crenshaw’s Kiss Number Eight from the shelves. Only after two town votes and a whole year had passed was the library able to secure the funding to remain open. 

Pages from Maia Koabe's Gender Queer

Maia Kobabe told me about Gender Queer’s courtroom battle. “The CBLDF totally came to my aid and had my back during the lawsuit in Virginia. I wasn’t sued directly, it was a bookstore, but my publisher wanted to be a supporting party. The CBLDF immediately picked up the case: they said, ‘this is important.’ I had multiple meetings with Jeff, and with the local counsel, and they would run by me how they framed their responses. They were really wonderful, and I’m so glad that they exist and that they took on this lawsuit. It was a massive win, and I feel really good about it. But it takes so many labor hours of humans to litigate this issue, which doesn’t even need to be an issue.”

 

Tasslyn Magnusson says, “Challenges became a political touchstone, a match – you have DeSantis in Florida uniting with a couple of other groups that saw this as an opportunity to galvanize the public. Through the internet, library Friends groups, parents groups who are being weaponized to attack librarians. We’re losing the battle, despite the fact that most Americans don’t like book banning.”

 

Betsy Gomez looks at challenges happening all over the country for the American Library Association. She says, “This is a national problem that's happening at the local level. You've got school boards and city councils and library boards in some areas that are making decisions about what is on shelves. And they're making these decisions either based on their own biased views, or because there's a small number of people who are leading an organized campaign against certain types of materials, and it can be a tough situation to be in. But we need our communities to show up for libraries and schools to say, ‘Hey. You know this is an institution, this for all of us, for all students, and it should represent the interests of all of us, and there are individuals who are trying to take our our right to make those decisions away by demanding the removal of books, and they don't speak for all of us.’ They aren't even the majority of us, you know. Our polling shows, regardless of political affiliation, that about 70% of U.S. voters do not support book bans. And we need that 70% of people to show up with these meetings and say, ‘Hey. Don't ban books. Don't ban comics. This is bad for our libraries. It's bad for our schools. It's bad for our kids.’”

 

What power do all of us have to make a difference in this nationwide crisis? 

 

“We have a national response already in the first amendment,” Betsy Gomez told me. “But the existence of the first amendment doesn't keep states or city councils from passing bad laws, from passing unconstitutional laws. And so that's one of the realities that we have to face. It's going to require litigation. In some cases it's going to require elections. It's going to require people standing up in their communities to stop this. I do see that there are a lot of politicians out there who are looking into this and trying to do what they can. But there's no one quick solution to this problem. It's gonna take work from a lot of folks to reverse this, but I think it can be done. That's why I do this work.”

 

Tasslyn Magnusson says that it’s individuals who are in a position to help. “I tell parents and community members to go to the school board meeting. You need to be talking positively about all the exciting things that your kid has learned, all of the amazing books you’ve seen come home with them, something that continues to show that people who have their back are there, and are actually the majority. We need to do that. It’s really important to help counter that need to self-censor.”

 

Jeff Trexler agrees. “A big part of what I wanted to do was move the CBLDF from an organization that would swoop in and save the day to a place where we win things community by community, and realize that the love of comics and graphic novels is organic to every town and city across the US, and around the world. What I’m trying to do is bring in people who we can work with and engage with the challenges in local communities, county by county, state by state.”

 

ALL TOGETHER NOW

 

All the thoughtful, wonderful people I talked to in writing this piece are working hard to fight book challenges and bans across the United States – and they’re all working together. 

 

Eti Berland sees her work as one puzzle piece that’s happening in concerts with everyone’s efforts. “I rely on the ALA reports, the PEN reports, and Kelly Jensen’s reports on Book Riot banned books and censorship,” she told me. “I think coalition-building is the core of this work.”

 

Jeff Trexler told me that he was seeing amazing support from the comics industry for the variety of work the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is doing to fight challenges and bans. “Raising money is incredibly important to fund legal support. One thing I can do is provide 100% free legal support. Another thing we’ve been involved in is challenges to legislation. A lot of what we do runs the gamut from let’s keep comics from having to be behind from the front desk, let’s get comics back in the classroom in this school district, let’s keep Blankets from being banned, let’s keep Gender Queer from being banned, let’s keep New Kid from being banned, let’s see what we can do to get statutes invalidated and declared unconstitutional. And to level up the theory of why this is happening and strategies for stopping it. I think there’s a chance of stopping this for another generation.”

 

So now’s the time to act; the American Library Association encourages readers to stand up and speak out on Let Freedom Read Day. “On September 28, 2024, we’re asking everyone to get ready to vote for the freedom to read or to take at least one action to help defend books from censorship and to stand up for the library staff, educators, writers, publishers, and booksellers who make them available!”

 

It’s Banned Books Week this week, and it’s more important than ever for the comics community to come together and work against challenges against comics and graphic novels. With their increased popularity, comics have come under threat; for comics to continue to grow, we all need to stand up to defend them. 

 

The post The State of Comics and Censorship appeared first on The Comics Journal.