#curatorbrownstein

[ourcomicsourselves]

Symposium On Comics & Censorship In the Arab World

Last March I got to speak in Beirut at a symposium on comics and censorship organized bySamandal Comics, an organization whose artists were prosecuted and fined by the Lebanese government for publishing comics they deemed to be anti-religious. The symposium examines intellectual freedom from different points of view and is presented in full in the audio recording above.

I started, examining censorship as an exercise of social control by government through the prism of comics censorship cases in the United States. I fundamentally advocated that more speech is always preferable than less speech; that freedom of expression guarantees the ability to compete in the marketplace of ideas, but does not inoculate from criticism; and that violence and political suppression must always be shunned as methods of combating speech. But my point of view comes from the privilege of living in the United States, where the First Amendment guarantees our right to free expression.

Dr. Irina Chiaburu, an expert in Soviet animation during the late Soviet period, examined censorship as a fact of state reality and suggested a framework through which artists seek to “outsmart” censorship. It’s easy for those of us in the United States to take for granted intellectual freedom, however it is not a basic and established right everywhere. In parts of the world where state censorship is a given, there are more fundamental arguments concerning intellectual freedom still raging. From my point of view, this should make us more deeply appreciative and protective of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Finally, lawyer Rana Saghieh spoke in detail about the facts of the legal case against Samandal where individual editors and artists were fined $20,000 for creating comics that Lebanese courts found to be anti-religious.

The symposium as a whole provides a valuable set of perspectives on free expression, and how freedom of expression underscores cultural and representational values central to social justice.

– Charles Brownstein

Charles Brownstein is the executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

[ourcomicsourselves]

In light of the fact that she recently spent 18 months in prison for drawing a caricature of the Iranian Parliament, Atena Farghadani could be forgiven for...

Atena Farghadani’s incarceration is the single most important free expression story in comics of the past year, and it’s a year that’s been fraught with school censorship, international government prosecutions, and legislative action against expressive content. Recently freed, Farghadani immediately took expressive action by developing new cartooning addressing injustices in her home country of Iran.  Earlier in the spring I was in Beirut lecturing at a symposium on free expression where a professor referred to many of the controversies involving comics in the United States as “luxury problems.” It wasn’t said with derision. It acknowledged that there’s a difference between outrage because the content of a consumer product from Disney or Warner Bros doesn’t measure up to an ideal of representation and going to prison for creating expressive art. 

Atena Farghadani is courageous because she continues to use comics to speak out for social justice, despite suffering the scars of imprisonment. Her example of courage in the face of adversity is proof of comics’ inspirational ability to speak truth to real power. - Charles Brownstein 

[ourcomicsourselves]

In the five short years that comprised their “New Trend” period, EC Comics set a higher standard for comics that continues to endure. Often lauded for high levels of craft in art and story, EC is also remarkable for the social conscience that imbues many of their stories. Here’s just one example, “In Gratitude,” a meditation on heroism, sacrifice, bigotry, and race by Al Feldstein and Wallace Wood first published in Shock Suspenstories #11, cover dated Oct-Nov 1953. 

Released mere weeks after the conclusion of the Korean War, this story embodies the clear eyed adult morality typical of EC. The publishing house was run by young men who were using the medium to tell stories that resonated with each other, and trusting they would reach an audience of like-minded readers. Feldstein, the story’s writer, was 28, Wood was 26, and William M. Gaines, the publisher, was 31. Yarns like “In Gratitude” were picking up a cultural conversation raging in the early 1950s and dramatizing them seriously in a commonly derided medium that most dismissed as kids fare.

It’s far more than kids that were reading these comics, if kids actually read them at all. I’ve also presented a letters page from Shock Suspenstories #13, with an outraged letter from an active duty serviceman who took umbrage with this story, and a flood of responses to that letter that were published in Shock Suspenstories #16.

Gaines died before I got into comics, and Feldstein I met only briefly. I wish I could have asked them why the industry conceded that comics were being sold predominantly to kids during the Senate Hearings of 1954, when their letters pages were proof positive that their comics were a platform for serious adult debate concerning one of the key social justice issues of the time.

-- Charles Brownstein Story scans from https://cacb.wordpress.com/2008/11/25/ec-comics-in-gratitude/