In time for Banned Books Week, Steve Duin of The Oregonian talks about the problems with banning books and graphic novels and how, even in a day and age in which freedom of speech is celebrated, schools, libraries, and bookstores are still…
CBLDF has joined a coalition led by the National Coalition Against Censorship condemning the boycott of an Ashland, Oregon, bookstore. The boycott resulted from the display of books that had been banned for racial reasons and was led by the Oregon…
The United States wasn’t the only country that harbored a crusade against comics this past century. Germany, too, has had its own sordid history with the medium, complete with public fears over an alleged increase in juvenile delinquency and subsequent…
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University recently welcomed a new addition to its prestigious collection of comic history artifacts: the personal archives of contemporary cartoonist and graphic novelist Howard Cruse. The collection which includes personal correspondences, audio…
After an extended legal battle, author and artist Dennis Cooper has regained access to over 14 years’ worth of materials — including a work in-progress GIF novel — from his Blogger site which was abruptly shut down on June 27 by…
In 1986, Denis Kitchen helped defend the First Amendment rights of comic shops and creators who had become the targets of censors in an increasingly hostile consumer environment, laying the groundwork for what would become the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Today,…
Since the attempted coup in Turkey, the country’s administration has been arresting and silencing journalists and cartoonists in the country, so Cartoon Movement sat down with four cartoonists — Menekse Cam, Emrah Arikan, Halit Kurtulmus and Oguz Gurel — to discuss the state of affairs and what it means to…
Minnesota Public Radio is challenging adult readers to set aside preconceived notions of YA literature and to pick up some of today’s most critically acclaimed — and even controversial — books for teen audiences. From This One Summer, an award-winning graphic…
A new, unconventional literary movement is taking hold in Nigeria in the form of romance novels. Called “love literature,” dozens of women are printing and even hand-writing thousands of novellas with the intent of speaking out against and challenging certain social…
From the initially successful and then rescinded ban of the award-winning coming of age novel Into the River in 2015, an 18+ rating on Alan Moore’s Lost Girls in 2014, or the seizure of the classic 1970s book Bloody Mama in 2011, New…