Four Color Wonders
Comics and censorship: From the Seduction of the Innocent to Boiled Angel.
      by Tara O'Shea

In 1986, the owner of a comic book direct sales shop in a Chicago suburb called "Friendly Frank's" became the target of local authorities. While driving past the local comics store, a sheriff's deputy was drawn to the store by a "lascivious depiction" of a female comics character. The character in question? DC Comics' squeaky-clean Amazon princess, Wonder Woman. Undercover agents returned to the store and purchased fifteen comics -- including seven from the clearly marked adult section of the store, among them Kitchen Sink Press' Omaha The Cat Dancer.

The Amazing Amazon.... star-spangled hero, or lacivious temptress?

Denis Kitchen, the publisher of Omaha, rallied comics professionals to raise money to help defend store manager Michael Correa from a charge of obscenity after he sold the adult comics to the adult undercover agents. "We ended up raising between 20 and 30,000 dollars," Kitchen recalled in an 1998 interview with the Weekly Alibi. "I then went out and found the best First Amendment attorney in the country, and we ended up getting a guy named Burton Joseph, who was associated with the Playboy Foundation." Correa's obscenity conviction was successfully overturned in an appeal two years later, and the remaining moneys were used to create the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (or the CBLDF, as it is commonly known).

"It was a big victory and we were real pleased with ourselves," Kitchen recalled. "At that point, [the Fund] was a one-man organization, and I had some money left in the bank. And I asked myself a simple question, 'Should I just donate the money to another good cause, or should I actually start an organization that's constantly vigilant because this could happen again?' Needless to say, it started happening a lot."

Since its inception, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has coordinated and funded the legal defense of First Amendment cases involving comic book artists, authors, publishers, distributors, and retailers across America. The non-profit organization's founding belief is that comics and comic books deserve the same freedom of expression accorded film, literature, and other media: "The uniting principle in all the cases we undertake is the First Amendment -- not censorship exclusively, but the First Amendment."

Most complaints filed are dealt with quickly and easily with correspondence from now staff attorney Burton Joseph. However, not all cases are so easily handled.

Take Florida writer/artist Mike Diana, creator of Boiled Angel.

"It all started back in 1991 with the student murder cases in Florida," Diana told a Chicago-area journalist in a 1996 interview. "There was 5 students killed in Florida and they were looking for a suspect who did the murders and I had my Boiled Angel #6 was just released and I had sent like 10 copies out through the mail to different places. On the cover of issue #6 I had this picture of a guy with a big hard-on and he's cutting this girl open and pulling out the fetus. So they saw this and figured I was the Gainesville murderer or something. I don't think they really thought that, but they were going after any leads they could. So they showed up with #6 and stuff, said I was a suspect and I had to give a blood sample..."

The small press, self-published 'zine -- with perhaps a peak print run of 300 copies -- contained graphic -- and gruesome -- tales of date rape, hate crimes, and child abuse. An undercover police detective, posing as an artist, solicited several copies of the 'zine from Diana. When he received notification that he was to appear in court to defend obscenity charges, Diana got in touch with the CBLDF, who provided him with representation, and arranged for testimonials from comics professionals from New York and California. The artist spent four days in a maximum security jail during his trial, beneath fluorescent lights that were kept on 24 hours a day, with nothing but a metal bench to sleep on. "People asked me what I was in [for]," said Diana in a 1996 interview, "and I told them 'drawing pictures.' They said 'Damn, they'll throw you in here for anything!'"

"So the prosecution, they had this psychiatrist say that every drawing in 'Boiled Angel' would cause people to commit crimes, and that it's for deviant people, that I had a sick mind and everything like that," said Diana four decades after Dr. Wertham published eerily similar claims in Seduction of the Innocent at the height of Cold-War hysteria.

One of the comic burnings of yesteryear.

Diana was convicted -- after the Florida jury found that his work "lacked serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value" -- on three counts of obscenity: one count of distributing, one count of publishing, and one count of advertising obscene material. The case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, but the Florida jury's decision was upheld and Diana became the first American artist in history to be convicted of obscenity for his artwork.

Diana was charged a $3,000 fine and other terms of his sentence included mandatory psychological testing at his own expense. He was prohibited from having contact with children under 18 years of age, thus losing his job at his parents' convenience store. He was also required to perform over 1,200 hours of community service, enroll in a journalistic ethics course (again, at his own expense) and serve three years of probation during which time his place of residence can be inspected at any time -- without a warrant -- to determine if he is in possession of, or is creating, "obscene material." In short, the cops can come in in the middle of the night to make sure Mike's not committing "art." Mike Diana has since relocated to New York City (where cops tend to be a bit too busy to make 3 am raids on artist's garrets) and in fact served out a portion of his community service volunteering for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

Today, the audience for comic books is predominantly adult -- over 75% of all readers in fact. But those statistics don't appear to have much effect on the mainstream perceptions of the genre's capacity for art and literature. Unlike countries like Japan, where there is manga for every age group, demographic, and subject -- from soap operas to baseball to horror to magical children -- in mainstream America, comics have earned (deservedly, or not) the status of disposable pulp entertainment of the lowest kind.

Pointing out that Shakespeare and Dickens were the "pulp fiction" of their time rarely seems to raise the status of comics in America, though important in-roads have been made.

A Survivor's Tale

Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale -- which tells the story of the author's father's survival in a German concentration camp and recasts the Nazi Holocaust with cats and mice -- won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. The committee created a special category for the two-volume "graphic novel", awarding Spiegelman a "Special Award And Citation - Letters". Earlier that year, Sandman #19: A Midsummer Night's Dream by author Neil Gaiman and illustrator Charles Vess was the first comic book to win the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. It was also the last, as in subsequent years, comic books were deemed ineligible for the awards.

But it's a start.

In particular, 1997 Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Defender of Liberty Award winner Gaiman's Sandman has become a cross-over success, as the trade paperback collections of the phenomenally popular monthly horror title from DC Comics "Suggested for Mature Readers" imprint Vertigo have found their way into the shelves of chains like Borders, and Barnes & Noble. A staunch supporter of the CBLDF -- despite the fact, or rather, because he is a British citizen -- Gaiman has raised tens of thousands of dollars for the Fund since relocating to the United States in 1992, and has raised over $160,000 for the fund through reading tours across North America and by donating scripts and even his leather jacket, which were auctioned off on eBay for charity. Artist/writer Frank Miller (Sin City, Return of the Dark Knight) and Dave Sim (Cerebus) also regularly campaign for the Fund. In the wake of the Columbine massacre and an era of politically correct finger-pointing that rivals the hysteria of the 1950s, organizations like the CBLDF may be our last best hope.

To learn how you can help raise awareness of First Amendment Rights in the comics industry, or to make a donation, check out the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund's website at www.cbldf.org.

The 11th Hour would like to acknowledge the tremendously comprehensive "Over 50 Years of American Comic Books" by Ron Goulart for being the coolest book on the history of comics ever.

We welcome your comments on The 11th Hour and this feature. Please send letters to: letters@the11thhour.com

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