Earlier this week, the Kids’ Right to Read Project, which is sponsored by CBLDF, sent a letter to the Prosser School District outside Yakima, Washington, in defense of A Child Called “It” and The Popularity Papers. Both books had been…
Category: Features
Congressional Task Force Recommends More Research on Media and Violence
Yesterday, Congressman Mike Thompson (D-CA) released “A Comprehensive Plan That Reduces Gun Violence and Respects the 2nd Amendment Rights of Law-Abiding Americans,” which describes the recommendations of the Congressional Gun Violence Prevention Task Force. Nearly all of the recommendations the task…
Another Senator Blames Video Games for Violence
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…
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…