banned books

Once again, adults are panicking at the very idea that kids might be allowed to read a comic book that accurately portrays the lives of other kids their age. In this case it's happening in Seminole County, Florida, where schools and local media have discovered that Jillian and Mariko Tamaki's award-winning This One Summer might not be appropriate for Third Graders, and are using that to justify keeping it out of the hands of the high schoolers at whom it's primarily aimed, and for whom it's entirely appropriate.

Censorship is a serious issue. It's one of the reasons that we here at ComicsAlliance always show our support to organizations like the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and rally behind creators who have been subjected to governmental restrictions on their work. Occasionally, though, there are incidents of people pushing to get books banned that slide right past concerning and directly into the world of hilarious ineptitude. Such is the case with Reverend Phillip Missick of Texas's amazingly named King of Saints Tabernacle Church, who pushed for the Cleveland, TX public library to remove manga like Matsuri Hino's Vampire Knight from its library, owing, of course, to it being a demonic product of Satan that would drag otherwise saintly children directly into the gaping maw of Hell itself. That, of course, is nothing new. What makes it amazing is that he didn't stop there, going so far as to declare pretty much everything around the manga to be the product of Satan, including a few Harry Potter toys, a bouquet of dried roses, and the actual room itself to be "occultic and demonic."

digg_url = '//comicsalliance.com/2010/09/30/banned-book-week-2010/'; tweetmeme_url = '//comicsalliance.com/2010/09/30/banned-book-week-2010/'; tweetmeme_source = 'comicsalliance'; Since 1982, the last week in September has been observed as Banned Books Week, during which readers are reminded that there are still people out there trying to get books like "Huckleberry Finn" and "The

This week is Banned Books Week, when we celebrate the fact that we live in a country where we are free to say, write and read what we choose -- and the importance of being vigilant against those who would try to erode those rights and make those choices for us...