Out of the Gutters: Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression, edited by Jorge J. Santos and Patrick S. Lawrence, explores US comics that have been challenged for their boundary-breaking content. Covering well-known underground figures like R. Crumb and Charles Burns, newcomers such as C. Spike Trotman and Emil Ferris, and mainstream creators including Chris Claremont and Archie Goodwin, the collection dives into the market economics of transgression, historical representations of graphic violence, the ever-changing meaning of pornography, sex-positive comics by BIPOC authors, and queerness in pop-culture mega-properties. Comics have long been and continue to be a subject of moral panics, but instead of targeting raw sex like Crumb’s counter-culture provocations in the last century, censors now focus on affirmations of nonheteronormative identity even where sex isn’t prominent, as in Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer. And while violence is a constant in comics, stories that acknowledge nationalist violence, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and the innovative Blazing Combat, have also been blacklisted.
Come join Professors Lawrence and Santos to discuss how comics creators resisted these censorship paradigms from their outset and how these transgressors paved the way for contemporary comics culture in both narrative and publishing terms. We will especially highlight California counterculture’s special role in saving comic books from bland irrelevance. Learn how the implementation of the Comics Code Authority and the censorship paradigm established by 1973’s Miller v California nearly vanquished the comic book industry altogether, as well as how stalwart industry creators, such as Archie Goodwin of Warren Publishing and the outrageously crude members of the Comix movement, boldly resisted, either seeking ways around the censorship apparatus or deliberately thumbing their noses at it. Come learn how San Francisco became a hot bed of anticensorship attitudes through the history of the comic book and the graphic novel while we consider what lessons we may learn from 20th century censorship to face 21st century challenges.
A virtual presentation by Jorge J. Santos Jr., author, editor, and Associate Professor, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the US, College of the Holy Cross, Worchester, Massachusetts and Patrick S. Lawrence, author, editor, and Professor of English, University of South Carolina, Lancaster