The Forbidden Planet International Blog Log

Over on Robot 6, there’s an interview with the creators of “Ulysses Seen” – Rob Berry and Josh Levitas - where they discuss the process of getting their webcomic onto the iPad and the changes they’ve had to make.

I’d heard about Apple’s policy on nudity before but never seen it in action before, but here’s two images from the comic – first the original, webcomic page….

now the iPad version….

Provided you haven’t been scarred by that image and feel the need for counselling by the sight of a naked male body, it does rather bring up the question of why Apple consider a strict “no-nudity” policy necessary.

Rob Berry in the Robot 6 interview:

Apple has strict guidelines and a rating system to prevent “adult content.” Their highest mature content rating is 17+, which doesn’t seem to be a problem since no one reads Ulysses at sixteen anyway. But their guidelines also mean no nudity whatsoever. Which is something we never planned for. Joyce’s novel is pretty explicit in its language and themes, so much so that in 1932 it won one of the most important court decisions about censorship in American history. While the first chapter of the book, the one now at iTunes, doesn’t contain “offensive language” our comic does have frank nudity. Something we figured we might have to pixelate or cover with “fig leaves”. But Apple’s policy prohibits even that. So we were forced to either scrap the idea of moving to the tablet with Apple or re-design our pages.

So someone agreeing to the 17+ rating isn’t allowed to view any nudity, no matter what the context? Doesn’t that seem a little restrictive to you? Imagine if Scott McCloud decided to do a history of fine art created for the iPad (for example) – under these rules he’d not actually be allowed to represent many of the greatest works of art in history.

Berry does clarify things later in the comments:

Apple’s restrictions apply to app developers but not to individual works offered by approved eBook publishers like Amazon. If they put Book Of Genesis in their package Apple would be unlikely to tell them no. With Ulysses Seen we were trying to design a unique type of reading experience that no existing eBook publisher has an app for, so we had to go this route. But bigger publishing houses can collect this material on their own and offer it through the iTunes store without the same extent of the restrictions.

Which does seem rather unfair to me and weighted totally in favour of bigger publishers. If you create direct for the iPad you have strict “no nudity” policy affecting your work, but if you’re big enough to be an approved eBook publisher it doesn’t apply? And the debate over visual representations of nudity come up yet again. A comparison using Apple would be the explicit lyric versions of various songs that are available on iTunes and, in my opinion, are far more offensive than something like the nudity in Ulysses. But Apple’s deliberate control of content on it’s iPad allows it to make these decisions for us, right or not.

The Ulysses Seen comic is available (uncensored) here.