UPDATE 25th June: Facebook site back up. It seems Facebook are very quick to take things down in cases like this, but, to their credit, will listen to reason and reinstate pages fairly quickly.

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall...” from the opening of Howl, by Allen Ginsberg.

I was lucky enough to get an advance viewing of the upcoming film Howl, inspired by Beat poet Allan Ginsberg’s famous poem, one of the seminal verse works of the 20th century and a major counter-culture landmark (right back when even the idea of a counter-culture was a new thing). Interesting to the literati, I’m sure, but some of you might wonder why I’m talking about it on the blog here. Well the film by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman has an interlaced three-part structure, intercutting between 50s style ‘documentary’ footage of James Franco (Milk, Spider-Man) as Ginsberg and the court battle when reactionary forces in American society attempted to have Howl banned from print as ‘obscene’. Linking these two strands is the third element: some wonderful animation based on the artwork and designs of acclaimed artist Eric Drooker.

How much the resulting collage will appeal to you will, I suspect, depend to some extent on your appetite for poetry (I love it, but I know a lot of people don’t care for it, which is a shame, it’s a different way of looking at the universe, like magic is to science, or jazz to Classical music). Verse is always best read out; when it is read out the voice accentuates the rhythm and life inherent in good poetry. It floats like fine jazz, conjuring imagery and emotions out of your mind, linking them, making them flow and intersect and cross-breed to spark off more images and emotions. The faux-documentary scenes of young Ginsberg reading Howl for the first time to a live audience throb with creative energy (Franco does a terrific job), but for me it was the reading of the poetry over Drooker’s animation that really worked. Animation, poetry and jazz all combining, sometimes with literal (or at least semi-literal) interpretations of the lines, at other times more symbolic in nature, dreamlike, or sometimes a dark dream, semi nightmare (for some reason it occasionally made me flash back to some of the dreamlike animated scenes in Waltz With Bashir), the animated form offers up a far superior visual compliment to the poetry than live action ever could.

The court case scenes are based on actual records and alongside the famous UK court battle a decade later over Lady Chatterly’s Lover (also for ‘obscenity’) it marks an extremely important moment in the post-war Western world where artistic freedom and freedom of speech won out over the older, more conservative, reactionary forces in society; even if you’ve never read a poem in your life Howl and the victory publisher City Lights scored in those 1950s courts have had an impact on anyone who reads or who enjoys art, because it not only broke artistic boundaries, it helped secure the primacy of the freedom of speech, that element of any democratic society that any reader holds most dear. It’s an intriguing film and for me Drooker’s art (and the work of the rest of the animation team drawing from his designs) hold the other aspects of the film together, allowing the film-makers to indulge in something other than the straight biopic you might expect (and which would never have suited a work as unusual as Howl).

HarperCollins published a graphic novel of Howl with Drooker’s artwork recently with art similar to what you will see in the film; the film of Howl itself opens in the UK on February 25th.

While I’d be outraged at anyone using that ‘n’ word today in conversation, the book was written in a period when it was in common use and it’s important readers, especially young readers, learn about this so they can contrast it with today when we try to be more inclusive and less bigoted, rather than pretending these things never happened. It’s like the nonsense over Tintin in the Congo – if you airbrush old books or comics and their history that goes with them then you rob young readers of an understanding of precisely why it is important in our modern world to have racial and cultural understanding and tolerance, why those things are needed and what the world was like before we tried to go down the modern route. But before I get into a rant about censoring classic books, what I really meant to do (before I started saddling my High Horse) was share a link to the new Tom the Dancing Bug cartoon, a revised version of Huck Finn for modern readers’ sensibilities, from BoingBoing, which hits it on the nail and made me laugh (thanks to ComicPlanet for the link):

(Tom the Dancing Bug’s take on the damnably silly revising of Huck Finn, by and (c) Ruben Bolling)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVzc67YuRQE

Bradbury has been one of my favourite writers since I was about ten or eleven and managed to get a hold of The Illustrated Man and Fahrenheit 451 remains one of those rare, vital works of literature that everyone who loves the written word and believes in freedom of speech and thought should have read. It is also one of those books that we geeks can hold up proudly when ignorant critics deride the worth of our beloved genre, a work that transcends genre and a work that, sadly perhaps, remains quite contemporary to modern society decades after it was written. Which makes it all the more important that people read it. (via SF Signal)

So the idea that American libraries are subject to the whims and hysteria of any group of overly concerned citizens who can formally object to any book they have taken issue with. These challenges come from all sorts, but some of them are quite head shakingly bizarre, as seen from the top ten challenged graphic novel slideshow at The Huffington Post.

My personal favourites:

Bone – challenged for “Sexually Explicit content, Offensive Language, Unsuited to Age Group, Drugs“.

Now I’ve read Bone several times and I reckon the only explanation for this one is that there’s a completely different version out there somewhere that these folks must have read. Either that or these people objecting to it are ridiculously sensitive to everything in the world and see sex and drugs everywhere they look.

Maus – challenged for being “Anti Ethnic“.

Yes, that’s right, Art Spiegelman’s classic graphic novel of Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust is anti-ethnic according to a large enough group of people to register on this list. The mind boggles.

Like the ALA President Roberta Stevens says, quoted by The Huffington Post article:

“Not every book is right for each reader, but we should have the right to think for ourselves and allow others to do the same, … How can we live in a free society and develop our own opinions if our right to choose reading materials for ourselves and our families is taken away? We must remain diligent and protect our freedom to read.”

“When the Danish cartoon debate broke out I was in Nigeria. If you stroll the streets of Kano, a Muslim-majority city in northern Nigeria, you will have no problem finding material caricaturing Christianity sold by street vendors. And if you go to the east of Nigeria, to Enugu for example, you will find a similar supply of materials caricaturing Islam. None of this is blasphemy; most of it is bigotry. It is well known that the Danish paper that published the offending cartoons was earlier offered cartoons of Jesus Christ. But the paper declined to print these on grounds that it would offend its Christian readers. Had the Danish paper published cartoons of Jesus Christ, that would have been blasphemy; the cartoons it did publish were evidence of bigotry, not blasphemy.”

I don’t think I agree with Mahmood – he seems to break down cartoons on religion into two categories, either blasphemy or bigotry, implying it is acceptable to create a blasphemous cartoon about your own religion but to do so about another religion is bigotry. This seems pretty flawed reasoning to me, it ignores the most obvious use of newspaper cartoons, which isn’t blashphemy or bigotry, its satirical commentary, which is an absolutely essential part of free speech in my book. His point about the Danish paper turning down cartoons of Jesus also seems selectively flawed – there’s been a vast amount of religious cartoons taking in Christianity over the years in Western publications, probably far more than any other religion. And more than a few Christian religious groups have complained strongly about them, be it a cartoon or be it Monty Python’s Life of Brian, but the same freedoms of speech which protect the right to freedom of religious views and worship also protect the right to create cartoon commentaries and satires on any and all aspects of a society and that must, by definition, include major institutions in that society, which would obviously mean religion too is fair game for the satirist and cartoonist.

Why would a cartoonist commenting on a religious group be bigotry or blasphemy but the same cartoonist satirising or commenting on a political group’s beliefs wouldn’t be?  To some of us who aren’t religious but are firm believers in freedom of speech it may well indeed be seen as offensive to be branded as a bigot or blasphemer for passing legitimate commentary. As I said, I don’t really agree with his reasoning, but it is still interesting to read a different cultural viewpoint on a much discussed topic.

But those in charge of taking care of the morals of developing, impressionable youths  were worried – some boys were already refusing to comb their hair with a neat side parting and Brylcreem it down, some girls were even thinking they might have a career before settling down to be a happy wife and mother, and who knows where that would end? Cannibal biker gangs with unkempt hair, most likely. And no dinner on the table when the Man of the House came home. Unspeakable horror. You have to love the central message of this clumsy bit of propaganda – yeah, kids, that’s what you want in a free country, the local policeman telling you what you should be reading (while at the same time schools of the era would be doubtless celebrating Western ways and telling pupils about the evils of Communist dictatorships where people were never free to choose what to say or read).

Funny and naive as this historical gem seems, viewed from half a century distant, the sad fact is there are still plenty of pressure groups out there who are determined to try and bans comics, books, albums, games, films and anything else they don’t agree with ‘for our own good’. Thank goodness the good writers and artists who can get messages across are on our side of the evil censorship war and the squares have the hacks who produce twaddle like this… Funny, I read tons of comics by folks like Pat Mills and John Wagner as a kid, reprints of old Weird Tales and the like too, then as a teen the first wave of ‘video nasties’ (before they had them banned ‘to protect us’), played computer games and yet I grew up to hardly serial murder anyone at all. (tip of the hat to Dave Gibbons for the link)

(cover to the upcoming fifth volume of complete Moomin comic strips by Tove Jansson, to be published this summer by Drawn & Quarterly)

As the blog of respected German comics publisher Reprodukt reports, Finland will be represented at the Expo as well. Amongst other things, the Moomins, the famous ghost-like creatures from Tove Jansson’s comics and storybooks (recently spotlighted here on the blog), would be featured in a stage play, called “The Father and the Sea”. However, the subject matter and content of the play has not been received well by the local authorities.  The German news blog Die Welt is quoted as reporting that the play is considered  to “not distinguish adequately between good and evil” and that one of the characters is supposed to be individualistic,”

The Chinese censors are now demanding changes, but director Anneli Mäkelä has rejected making any alterations.

Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium and considers this to be another bad Shanghai Surprise; you can read more of his comics musings on The Ephemerist blog

“How Angry Freelancers Made It Possible for A New Mainstream Comics Era (Including Vertigo) to Exist“

It all starts off looking at the moment in 1986 where comic publishers began to get a little twitchy over the content of their increasingly adult books – remember 1986, we’re in Maus, Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen territory, the era of “comics aren’t just for kids” and a real move on the part of major publishers (particularly DC) to embrace a new wave of writers and artists wanting to tell far more serious stories.

So far Bissette’s looked at the infamous Friendly Franks bust, the on-cover ratings that both Marvel and DC threatened to bring in, Words & Pictures magazine, Diamond Comics Distributors, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Miracleman, Jack Kirby, Marv Wolfman, lawsuits galore, and much, much more…..

There’s an awful lot of reading there, together with a lot of original documents from the time from Bissette’s archives. Fascinating stuff. Part 1 is here, the latest is Part 7. But Bissette has more to come.

(Creator’s letter from 1986 and a Frank Miller cartoon of the same vintage)

“Drawing on this strong body of true material, Johnston develops and refashions it further into the story of his entirely fictional Marco. Centre stage, mainly on a high stool, throughout the 70 minutes, Henry Blake plays the vulnerable teen with depth and subtlety, as he is barraged by his wheeler-dealing lawyer, his brittle blonde Behaviourist shrink, two shrill fundamentalist moral guardians in drag, and the screaming male chorus from “Up from the Closet”, a “faith-based” counselling group intent on reprogramming Marco into a Jesus-loving heterosexual. Almost without notice, the action can jump from these scenes to another encounter Marco has in an awkward interview for a job in a coffee shop in New York, where he’s fled to with only $8 left in his pocket. This scene too can be interrupted by two guys in hockey-style white face-masks and red T-shirts (one of a Boiled Angel cover) as they enact some of the disturbing but ridiculous scenes drawn in the comic.”

I’ve never read Diana’s original work and I’m not even sure its something I’d be particularly interested in reading, but that’s not really the point – the heavy handed censorship in a supposedly free society is; something which always makes my blood boil. It sounds like an interesting play and certainly gets a thumbs up from Paul both as a play and for publicising a censorship event many probably haven’t even heard of. Busted Jesus Comix  runs at the Above the Stag Theatre in London until November 28th.