Fiction that Matters

latimes:

Cartoonist and commentator David Horsey on the 112th Congress: Underwhelming 

(via qbits)

Manga's greatest censorship fails

penamerican:

Manga has been censored in a thousand ways, from Baby Goku Penis in Dragon Ball (gotta put some shorts on), to violence and nudity, to offensive racial depictions (maybe if Quentin Tarantino—one of Hiroyuki Takei’s favorite filmmakers—had done a live-action Shaman King movie in some parallel universe, he’d have been insane enough to keep the original name of the blaxploitation character, Chocolove). But some attempts at censorship still stand out for their total ineptitude or absurdity. Here, for the New Year, are my picks of the Greatest Manga Censorship Fails.

21-12-12 is a Mayan prophecy indicating the ned of the world. However most people view this prophecy as absolute rubbish. Zapiro’s cartoon sees Jacob Zuma as the The INEXPLICABLE Survivor in “The 21-12-12 End of the World Prediction” of the Mayan prophecy.

Dan [Archer] is going to use the funds for his travel in Nepal to gather testimony from people who have been directly effected by human trafficking.  He has a staff of translators, fixers and survey givers he will pay with the money raised.  This is something that has never been done before, and if that’s not enough, he will give backers the opportunity to watch him report/create the comic in real time.  Real time online art videos have become very popular and I think builds a bigger bond between fans and the creators.  It should be interesting to see how this comic is created and his commentary as he makes it.

elhijodesoraya:

By: Mana Neyestani.

(via bandnerdy)

The history of comics censorship is a sordid saga of misguided censors, self-imposed silence, criminal prosecutions, and suppression of free expression that led to the obliteration of thousands of careers, more than a few publishers, and even an entire country’s comics industry.

CBLDF blogger Joe Sergi has broken down some of the specific instances of comics censorship, from the attacks in on what is widely accepted as the first comic book — attacks that predate the comics code by almost 60 years — to a side-by-side visual comparison of how the Comics Code led to the nonsensical editing and revision of thousands of books.

Let’s take a quick stroll through comics censorship history…

Read more

In The Vanni, a multimedia graphic novel by Benjamin Dix and Lindsay Pollock, we discover Antoni’s roots in Sri Lanka, and his journey to England as an asylum seeker, after being forced to come here during the closing stages of the civil war in 2009. 

In a unique format through illustrations and photographs that sometimes morph into each other, the reader finds out that Antoni was happy with his occupation as a fisherman in the north of Sri Lanka. Yet his humble existence, with his wife, two children, mother and sister-in-law was brought to an end in 2008 when they were forced to flee from the escalating violence in the area. 

Click here for the Kickstarter campaign.

Click here for the preview

The brilliant, haunting comics of Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani. 

Charles Brownstein, Executive Director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, speaks at NY Comicon about censorship in comics and their effort to defend someone arrested for crossing the border with hand-drawn manga.