Senator Lamar Alexander (R-KY) wasn’t the only senator to blame video games for gun violence last week. Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) claimed during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that “[there] are too many video games that celebrate the mass…
Category: Features
College Paper Sparks Debate Over Social and Racial Commentary in Cartoons
On January 24th, the editorial board of the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s student newspaper, The Badger Herald, decided not to run artist Vincent Cheng’s “Ya Boi, Inc.” comic strip for that day. Cheng’s strip (shown above) depicts a middle-aged man…
Banned Egyptian Graphic Novel Back on Cairo Shelves
The banning of cartoons and graphic novels by the foreign regimes they criticize is an all-too-common story. So, it is always a welcome change to report a formerly banned work’s re-release. A once-banned graphic novel that criticized Hosni Mubarak’s government…
NCAC Defends Video Games in Massachusetts
In the wake of the Newtown shootings and after receiving a complaint from one set of parents, the state of Massachusetts removed arcade games that use light-guns from state-managed rest stops along the Massachusetts Turnpike. In response, the National Coalition…
NCAC Film Contest Lets Kids Fight Censorship
Each year, the National Coalition Against Censorship — a frequent CBLDF partner and organizers of the CBLDF-sponsored Kids’ Right to Read Project — produces the Youth Free Expression Project Film Contest. We recently came across the website for the 2012…
Tales From the Code: The Near Extinction of Sheena
The comic books of the Golden Age represented little more than escapism for millions of readers. And no one provided escape better than Sheena Queen of the Jungle, whose exotic adventures and good girl art titillated male readers and spawned an…
Suspended Student Poet Allowed Back to School
We have a quick update on Courtni Webb, the San Francisco high school student who was suspended from school last month after a teacher found a poem that mentioned the Newtown shootings in her private notebook. According to a blog…
California Student Suspended for Newtown Poem
Remember the 16-year-old from New Jersey who was arrested last month after a teacher reported his notebook doodles of “what appeared to be weapons?” Now the same sort of hypervigilance on the part of school officials has caused another teen…
KOTAKU Takes a Look at 25 Years of Research on Violent Video Games
After the violence in Newtown — and really, any violent mass shooting these days — it didn’t take long before pundits were blaming violent video games for the violence. As happened with comic books in the 1950s, video games have…
How You Can Report a Library Challenge to ALA
Like CBLDF, the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom is a resource that librarians can call upon for help when facing a book challenge. The OIF maintains a confidential database of information about library challenges, which helps them identify…