EDIT: added .cbz files to the drive link. Someone was nice enough to donate them! whoa here's a link to a thing. I promise it'll make sense if you keep reading I just don't want this to get lost.
So on September 4th, Marcello Crivella, the fascist mayor of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, stormed the Riocentro Bienal do Livro, a huge literature convention, and attempted to seize every volume of Avengers: The Children's Crusade from the convention, citing pornographic content as the reason.
It may not surprise you to hear that Marvel's 2011-2012 event did not feature any pornographic content, since you, dear reader, are most likely not a complete fool. What The Children's Crusade did contain was the very first on-panel kiss between Hulkling and Wiccan, one of Marvel's best couples, who had been dating since 2005 but had not previously been shown kissing because they are both male and mainstream comics were and are still something of a puritanical nightmare ruled by the angriest, most conservative fan voices and helldemon Isaac Perlmutter instead of...like...creators.
The Children's Crusade is not Kieron Gillen's 2013 Young Avengers run - still the best story about the Hulkling and Wiccan relationship - but it was the first one to show them kissing. I guess if you're a dumb mayor who knows little to nothing about comics and just wants to make a statement, you wouldn't do all that much research.
Now, seven years after the Children's Crusade kiss was first published in Brazil, Mayor Crivella incorrectly used articles 78 and 79 of Brazil's Children and Teenagers statutes to ban the books, ignoring Brazil's constitution, which states that media cannot be censored in this way. I dunno how much it'll matter that he's breaking the law to ban gay content, but I figured....whether this gets struck down or not, I might as well do my part to make it a little harder to control the distribution of this story.
So...I've spent a good chunk of the day tracking down Avengers: The Children's Crusade in both English and Portuguese. Read it, download it, spread them around as much as possible. If you know someone who lives in or is from Brazil, send it their way! If you can read English or Portuguese and wanna visit or revisit this story, please do! Spread this link around and spread the images from the story around. Let's make this comic as available as possible to as many people as possible. Let's do our part to make it impossible for Mayor Crivella to keep the image of Hulkling and Wiccan out of the sight of any children who have an internet connection.
Here's that link again.
Have at it.
