Results tagged “censorship” from Uncivil Society

I'm immersed in another intense pre-Thanksgiving week, and this odd bit o' corporate culture from Weird Universe provided welcome comic relief.

Cascadian Farm sells frozen vegetables. As a way of maintaining good spirits within the company, the package design department has hidden in the veggie pics the faces of "friends and family" associated with the firm.

Apparently the notion of noshing on heads is garnering some unwanted attention, so the practice is about to be discontinued. Which I guess makes Cascadian Farm frozen foods just another cold-hearted corporation . . .

Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia--the fear of 666, the number of the Beast--isn't limited to math-obsessed Christians. A Youtube commenter posted what should have been comment #666 on a video for Reminiscing by the Little River Band.

However, when Youtube tallied the comment numbers, it skipped from 665 to 667.

I wonder if Godtube has the same policy . . .

As historically-minded comics readers are aware, government pressure in the 1940s and '50s forced literate comics for adults underground. The most celebrated victim of this censorship movement: EC Comics, which published (among other things) Tales from the Crypt.

The title was recently revived, and in keeping with its legacy of defending free speech the next issue will address issues raised by Sarah Palin's "rhetorical" inquiry into removing objectionable books from the local library.

[A]ny White House candidate who even entertains a conversation about book banning is a natural enemy to "Tales from the Crypt," according to Jim Salicrup, editor-in-chief of Papercutz, the publisher that revived the classic title about 16 months ago. "This was not a partisan thing. People tend to think of everything as black and white these days -- you are either for or against one of the parties 100%. But for us this was about the history of EC Comics, the original publisher of 'Tales from the Crypt.' Anyone who knows that history knows that even of whiff of banning books is going to get us angry."

Media communities are buzzing about this group's success in getting Scholastic to withdraw the Bratz line from in-school book fairs.

Here's the organization's slightly edited mission:

CCFC's mission is to reclaim childhood from corporate marketers. A marketing-driven media culture sells children on behaviors and values driven by the need to promote profit rather than the public good. The commercialization of childhood is the link between many of the most serious problems facing children, and society, today. When children adopt the values that dominate commercial culture . . . the health of democracy and sustainability of our planet are threatened.

Much better, it seems, to go back to a more innocent time before kids were corrupted by corporate values.

Like in this old children's book:

Above: Cast your vote by pre-ordering the candidate comic of your choice.

Below: An excerpt from Superman vs. Uncle Sam, an interview with comics scholars David Hadju and M. Thomas Inge. The subject: Censorship.

There's always a threat to what comics represented in the early post-war years in the late 40s' and 50s'. Comics don't represent that anymore. There's always a threat to subversion and insurgency and the daring that comics represented back then.

It takes place, not in the pages of comics, but elsewhere like video game screens. It takes place in Grand Theft Auto 4 now. It's the same thing. What we see in GTA is a form of art entertainment not just meant for young people, but also meant to be a way for young people to challenge the conventions and standards of nicety, moral values, and these aesthetic values of their parents' generation. They're assimilated and this is the pattern that goes on in radical forms of culture over and over again. . . . The parallel to the comics, of video games, whatever will be invented next, about 20 years from now will continue to serve that same societal function.

The Ephemerist finds a copy of a 1962 comic adapting the film The Underwater City--with the evolutionary material scratched out & replaced with divine creation:

Above: a Peking Olympics-themed Dutch cartoon, "The 100 meters free speech" race. The Ephemerist particularly likes the "implicaton that free speech automatically entails uncouth language and verbal abuse."

The cartoon is actually pretty much on target. Swearing and other vituperative speech help build social norms and cohesion; allowing such speech strengthens the group. The title of this academic article reflects the broader research: "Swearing at work and permissive leadership culture: When anti-social becomes social and incivility is acceptable."

$#!%, even evangelicals are doing it!

"To a person using the whole sensorium, nudity is the richest possible expression of structural form. But to the highly visual and lopsided sensibility of industrial societies, the sudden confrontation with tactile flesh is heady music indeed."

--Marshall McLuhan

Pictured above: an on-the-street advertising campaign by Lush soap in Germany. The gimmick: to highlight the excessive packaging of other brands by getting Lush employees to go on the streets with less packaging on their own bodies.

Yes, this was commercial marketing with a social mission, but somehow I don't think I'll be seeing it repeated in New York anytime soon. And as Copyranter inquires, why only the women?

A local marketing firm designed subway ads for a local medical practice. The hook: to give the ad a 2.0 vibe by using empty comic-style speech bubbles to represent the prospective clients thoughts:

Now, in all honesty we expected our ads to be written on – that was a bit of the point. But we didn’t design them to encourage vandalism; being subway riders ourselves, we simply recognized that boredom + creativity + mischief often leads to ads being written on and remixed (sometimes with hilarious results), and we decided to capitalize on it.

And as predicted, within hours people started filling in their feelings . . .

. . . prompting the firm's media placement company to yank the campaign.

Boo. It was fun. And clever.

The FCC is considering a proposed new rule to require licensees of the 2155-2180 MHz band to dedicate a portion of its network capacity to making broadband Internet access available for free.

However, there's a catch: the licensee has to filter out "inappropriate content." And what is that, you ask? A few things to note from proposed Section 27.1193, Content Network Filtering Requirement:

(a) The rules requires blocking "images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography." Note the "and pornography," which seeks to expand the scope of the prohibition beyond what is obscene.

(b) The licensee must also block "any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents," i.e., "children five through 17 years of age." Yes, that's right--the FCC wants to make the five-year-old mind the regulatory standard for internet content, which I guess would make this the golden age for poop jokes.

(c) Per proposed section 27.1193(b), these rules also apply to material transmitted via peer-to-peer file sharing--and if the license finds it impractical to review every file shared, it has the right to "use other means, such as limiting access to those types of communications." In other words, because people can use P2P and other modes of transmitting data to provide access to material not suitable for a five-year-old, an ISP has the right to shut 'em down.

Needless to say, these rules would affect far more than obscenity and kiddie porn. Web comics, Flickr, Youtube, Hulu--shoot, this effin' blog would pretty much be toast.

A plea deal has ended this controversial federal case, in which a woman was convicted on federal obscenity charges for posting violent stories about children on her website as a way of working through her own sexual abuse as a child.

On my list of things to do this year is to write about this issue in more depth, because it truly is a minefield for today's creatives, especially after the Supreme Court's recent rulings on child pornography.

The depiction of women in comics has received its fair share of criticism in recent years, most notably in Gail Simone's Women in Refrigerators and Valerie D'Orazio's Occasional Superheroine. Comics have likewise sparked some controversy in regard to images of heroic homosexuality. But as the latest documents released in the Jerry Siegel case illustrate, these issues have a long history.

The documents in question: correspondence between Detective Comics and Jerry Siegel from 1939 through 1947, entered into evidence as part of DC's attempt to establish that all the work done by Siegel & Shuster during that time was work for hire. The case still has a while to percolate--the judge has postponed the hearing on unresolved trademark/copyright issues until September 15--but the material itself is a gold mine for folks interested in the comics history.

Even apart from the gender issues there's a lot of amazing stuff here--the recurring savage criticism of Joe Shuster's art; an early critique of Wayne Boring as an artist unsuitable for Superman; the hiring of Winsor McCay, Jr. as Superman ghost-artist-in-training; the insinuation that Superman was not significantly more popular than Zatara, Pep Morgan and Tex Thomson; and the prohibition on depictions of a flying Clark Kent are just a few of the historical moments in the mix.

Yet it is the sex stuff that really stands out, providing a rare insiders' perspective on the comics writing culture of the past. One of the true highlights of the newly released correspondence is the black-and-white sketch of Lois Lane included in this post. The artist was Siegel's and Shuster's editor, Whitney Ellsworth, who was attempting to get the duo to make Lois Lane less curvaceous.

A little backstory is in order. Although we tend to associate comics censorship with the 1950s, in actuality the complaints arose almost as soon as superheroes made comics a ubiquitous pop phenomenon. In a letter dated February 19, 1941, Ellsworth makes clear that this was foremost on his mind when he says to Siegel, "You know as well as I do what sort of censure we are always up against, and how careful we must be."

Which made a curvy Lois a bit of a problem. When drawn in an especially tantalizing way she posed a risk of drawing the attention of the moral watchdogs, a risk that Ellsworth tried to forestall in 1940 by ordering the duo to "de-sex" her.

After Shuster showed no sign of taking this admonition to heart, Ellsworth made an argument that seems shocking even almost seventy years later. Shuster's Lois was so "unpleasantly sexy" that her pulchritude made her seem a bit too heavy--a problem for which Ellsworth and Murray Boltinoff had an easy solution:

[W]hy it is necessary to shade Lois' breasts and the underside of her tummy with vertical pen-lines we can't understand. She looks pregnant. Murray suggests that you arrange for her to have an abortion or the baby and get it over with so that her figure can return to something a little more like the tasty dish she is supposed to be.

And the criticism didn't stop there; editorial also had problems with her hair style and her clothing,

which looked like you have apparently dressed her out of a Montgomery Ward catalogue. [Jack Liebowitz] suggests Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper's Bazaar as likelier spots for dress-research.

A look at Superman's DC Archives shows that these admonitions had their intended effect. The previous two images are from Superman #7, complete with breast shading and vertical lines in her, um, lower tummy. In contrast, here she is a few months later, with a much slimmer waist and bust-reducing lapels:

The criticism did not stop with Lois, however. Another alleged problem with Shuster's artwork is that it made Superman look gay--or in the period slang of Ellsworth's January 22, 1940 letter, "lah-de-dah" with a "nice fat bottom"--

What's worse, the pose in the second panel also reminded Ellsworth of "certain FLIT ads done by a cartoonist who signs himself 'Dr. Seuss.'"

For a cultural historian, documents like these are a treasure trove, providing insight into attitudes toward women, standards of beauty, images of masculinity, censorship and the interplay between comics and other illustrated media.

For Siegel and Shuster, such critiques were serious business. If you want to understand why they took the risk of suing DC in 1947 to regain the rights to Superman, read these letters--time and again the company warns them that their work borders on the "unacceptable"--"the situation is serious enough to warrant your doing some real worrying," as DC might "make other arrangements to have [the work] done." Since DC seemed to be building a case to get rid of them, a lawsuit--no matter how risky--seemed to have better odds than the prospect of winning over the publisher.