Comic-Con Panel Warns That Comic Book Censorship Is ‘Emboldened’

An audience at the San Diego Comic-Con, which wrapped up on July 22 as the San Diego, California, Convention Center, heard a dire warning from the head of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, who said that comic book censorship has seen an “emboldening” recently, especially in the area of what he called “identity censorship,” according to a report by the comics industry news site The Beat.  CBDLF Director Charles Brownstein, moderating the “Censorship in Comics” panel at SDCC, told the audience he defined “identity censorship” as “a pervasive and destructive trend that involves censoring content because of the author of the work, the content, or the intended audience for the material,” according to the Beat account. Brownstein said that comics by LGBTQ creators, or those dealing with “queer” themes have been the most frequent targets of identity censorship. Popular “drag queen storytime” events in which, as the name implies, drag queens visit public libraries in full regalia, to read stories to children, have been frequent targets of identity censorship, according to Los Angeles Public Library teen services coordinator Candice Mack, who was a member of the panel. In one recent case, the CBDLF came to the defense of comics creator Lilah Sturges who was scheduled to appear at Leander Public Library in Texas, where she would read from her graphic novel, Lumberjanes: The Infernal Compass. Sturges is a trans woman who has also penned scripts for the DC Comics series Jack of Fables, and Justice Society of America. But only two hours before her scheduled talk, Sturges was told by library officials that her event was cancelled. “By all appearances, it looks like the Leander Public Library canceled this event on a discriminatory basis,” Brownstein told the Comic-Con audience. “Because Lilah is a trans author, and because this follows a moral panic involving LGBTQI materials.” Brownstein also cited a previous incident in which two Texas high school teachers had included the DC and IDW comics anthology Love Is Love on their teaching syllabus. The book was assembled following the 2016 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub, a gay nightspot in Orlando, Florida. The shooting took the lives of 49 mostly LGBTQ clubgoers, and wounded 53 more. But even though the teachers had secure grant money to purchase copies of the comic book anthology for students, the school superintendent in Irving, Texas, ordered the book dropped from the curriculum just two days before the course in which it was to be taught was set to begin. “In the USA, freedom of expression isn’t a privilege, it’s a guaranteed right,” Brownstein told the Comic-Con audience. “And yet, despite this fact that’s enshrined in our Constitution, we regularly see pushback against content.” Photo By The Conmunity - Pop Culture Geek / Wikimedia Commons