A mother in North Tyneside, UK set off a bit of a British media frenzy last week with her request to remove a version of Sleeping Beauty from her six-year-old son’s school curriculum because the story might suggest to “children…
Tag: europe
Spanish Cartoonists Release Free Expression Manifesto
Dozens of Spanish political cartoonists have signed their names to a manifesto in defense of free speech, citing recent attempts to prosecute comedy under the country’s two-year-old ‘gag law’ as well as a recent string of cartoonists abruptly fired from…
City of Warsaw Revokes Comics Festival Grant After Nationalists Object
The city of Warsaw, Poland has withdrawn a three-year grant supporting an annual comics festival after nationalist groups complained about the content of a comic that was distributed during the event earlier this month. The book Polska mistrzem Polski (Polish…
French Government Investigating New Death Threats Against Charlie Hebdo
French government prosecutors opened an investigation last week into new credible death threats against surviving members of the staff at Charlie Hebdo, an anonymous source told Le Parisien newspaper yesterday. The threats came by mail and on the magazine’s Facebook page…
Lesbian Flirtation Edited Out of Steven Universe in Sweden
Over 1,300 Swedish fans of the Cartoon Network show Steven Universe have signed a petition objecting to dialogue changes in the Swedish-language version of a recent episode that effaced a same-sex flirtation between the characters Ruby and Sapphire. The network acknowledges…
Comic Created in WWII Safehouse Finally Published Decades Later
While hiding in a Dutch attic for more than two years during World War II, Emmanuel Joels passed the time creating a comic week by week and sending it to his girlfriend Hetty van Son, also hiding just a few…
Bulgarian TV Network Drops Cartoonist Who Mocked Prime Minister
Bulgarians are accusing the privately-owned TV network NOVA of bowing to government pressure last week when it removed all of cartoonist Chavdar Nikolov’s work from its website. Nikolov’s latest animated political cartoon had mocked Prime Minister Boyko Borisov’s apparent support…
Franco-Syrian Cartoonist Struggles to Process Hebdo Attack, International Affairs
Riad Sattouf, Franco-Syrian creator of the universally lauded graphic memoir The Arab of the Future, is an uneasy symbol of the intercultural tensions currently roiling Europe and the Middle East. A longtime contributor to Charlie Hebdo and until 2014 the…
Horror Comics Blamed for 1950s Scottish Vampire Panic
The year was 1954. The location: Glasgow, Scotland’s Southern Necropolis, a massive graveyard harboring over 250,000 sets of mortal remains. Over a span of three nights that September hundreds of children under the age of 14 reportedly assembled there with…
Manga Cop-Out at the Swedish Supreme Court
In the abstract, most people in free societies would probably agree that no one should be fined or thrown in jail simply for possessing drawings of any sort. But when the drawings in question are certain varieties of manga, often…