by Matt Hershberger, RBPL Comics Buyer
This week is the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week,” and for the second year running, the number one most challenged book in the country is a comic. The comic in question (both years) is Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, a graphic memoir about the author’s journey through adolescence to identifying outside the gender binary in adulthood.
As a public library, we’re obviously of the opinion that people should get to read whatever they want. If they don’t want to read a book, they don’t have to. Parents of course have a right to monitor what media their children consume, but they don’t have the right to tell other parents and other children what they can read.
Comics, unfortunately, have long been one of the main battlegrounds for book banning. The reasons are fairly simple:
1. Comics are a visual medium.
Because comics are illustrations and words, the parts of them people find “objectionable” are immediately apparent. If you pick up a random novel and open it to a random page, you still have to do some work and read a few paragraphs to figure out what’s going on in the plot. If you open up a comic to a random page, you’ll figure it out a lot quicker. So parents who are monitoring their kid’s reading might never know that a words-only novel has some steamy scenes in it, but a graphic novel is far more likely to get caught.
Some might take this fact as evidence that the people who like to ban books tend to not actually read them, which would make comics much more low-hanging fruit.
2. Comics are still viewed by many as “kids” books.
In spite of the enormous strides the comics industry has made over the last few decades, many people still view comics as being effectively “kids” books, simply because they have pictures. For this reason, some book challengers interpret any comic book as an attempt to “target” or “indoctrinate” children, because it’s a picture book.
There is no doubt that comics are an excellent tool for getting kids into reading: kids who grew up on picture books may find it easier to transition into comics because they can still focus on the images, but because the vast majority of comics still use written words to move the story along, they get the reading practice they need in stealth form (Parents who want their kids to read more, take note: let your kids read comics!).
But comics are like any other art form – there are comics made for kids and comics made for adults. No one has trouble differentiating a cartoon for kids – Bluey or Spongebob – from a cartoon for adults – Rick and Morty or The Simpsons – so the same standard should be applied with comics.
With that said, younger people are more likely to pick up comics (there’s a less of a stigma to comics in younger generations), but I suspect that will fade with time – give us another 50 years, and I, for one, will be reading comics in my 80’s.
3. Comics have a fairly seedy history.
Basically as long as people have been drawing pictures, they’ve been drawing sexually explicit pictures – literally the oldest known cave drawings are of female body parts and horse butts – so it’s no surprise that much of the early comics industry was pornographic. In the United States in the early 20th century, one popular form of comics were “Tijuana Bibles,” which were basically porn, and as mass produced superhero comics became more and more of an industry throughout the middle of the century, some of this seedier culture migrated into the comics mainstream in the form of “underground comix.”
Underground comix became part of the mainstream in response to the McCarthy-era Comics Code Authority, which effectively acted as an industry censor in the way the Hays Authority did in Hollywood. During the 60’s and 70’s, they became a part of the counterculture, featuring more sex and violence than the CCA would’ve allowed, but also featuring subversive political and cultural ideas, as well as giving space to authors from LGBTQ+ and feminist backgrounds. Through the 80’s and 90’s, underground comics became “alternative” comics, often self-published or released in zines or alternative publications.
It’s worth mentioning – most of what has helped the comics industry gain “respectability” in recent years has come from these “underground” or “alternative” comics artists: Art Spiegelman (author of Maus), Harvey Pekar (American Splendor), Alan Moore (Watchmen), Terry Gilliam (Monty Python) and Alison Bechdel (Fun Home) all came into comics through the underground and alternative routes. Even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was originally a self-published alternative comic!
Comics being disproportionately banned is a good reason to read more comics
One of the main reasons comics are being so regularly banned lately is that there has been a particularly good crop of comics about LGBTQ+ issues or by LGBTQ+ artists in recent years. Non-binary artist Kobabe aside, trans artist ND Stevenson (Nimona, Lumberjanes, and also the showrunner behind She-Ra and the Princesses of Power) has already been insanely prolific for a 30-year old, lesbian artist Tillie Walden became one of the youngest Eisner-winners ever for her 2018 graphic memoir Spinning, and gay/non-binary artist Trung Le Nguyen’s The Magic Fish won the 2021 Harvey Award for Book of the year.
Unfortunately, LGBTQ+ books are the ones that have been most frequently banned in the past few years. Aside from Gender Queer, The Magic Fish, This One Summer, Fun Home, A Quick and Easy Guide to Queer & Trans Identities, Flamer, and The Fire Never Goes Out are all LGBTQ+ books (all on our shelves, by the way!) that have been challenged on the basis of their content. This is not surprising – LGBTQ+ content has a long history of being among the first to be attacked and suppressed by enemies of Free Speech. The very first large-scale book burning during the Nazi era in Germany was on the library at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sex Research, which contained an enormous amount of research on the topics of homosexuality, intersexuality, and transgender people.
LGBTQ+ content does not, of course, account for all of the bannings: Art Spiegelman’s Maus, about his father’s experiences during the Holocaust, was also recently banned from a Tennessee School District (for having , and the graphic adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank has been challenged as well. George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy, an account of his time in Japanese internment camps during World War II has been challenged, as was I Am Alfonso Jones, which is about a black child killed in an incident of police brutality.
Regardless of the reason for a banning, librarians as a whole are extremely pro-First Amendment, anti-censorship. Our job is not to judge people on what they read, nor is it to decide what counts as “offensive.” When we add books to our shelves, the main question we ask is, “Do people want to read this?” If we’re taking books off the shelves (which we sometimes have to do, just because of limited shelf space), the question is “Has anyone read this in the past five years?”
We are not here to tell you which books you should and shouldn’t read. We will give recommendations though, and on this Banned Books Week, my recommendation is to read a banned comic. You may like it, you may hate it, but I’ve found one thing to be true: The books people try to ban are never the boring ones.