Dragon Ball Kid Library Controversy

So a councilman in Wicomico County, Maryland is pushing forward with a complaint that a mother of a nine-year-old apparently made after her child checked out a copy of Dragon Ball Vol. 1 from the library shared by the middle school and elementary school. If the councilman indeed called the very good and very funny Akira Toriyama manga "disgusting," he should never be allowed to be a critic, but at the same time, I think anyone who's read the title can think of someone they know who's very rational and reasonable who would not want that particular book in the hands of their nine-year-old and might be surprised to find it available to them. It's not a new thing, so I can't see this being a manga literacy issue. I know from my own experience that there were books put in the kids sections that I perused in the late 1970s that were shelved in that section because they were fantasy books but often had sexual elements to them that made me go lie down and watch cartoons for an hour, a little bit of the childish veneer air-blasted off of my soul.

So cosmic karmic kidney punches to any douchebag cultural warrior who presses the point and goes after grant money or bad librarians or anything like that. At the same time, I think this is a book I would probably not make part of an institution offering designed to hit kids at a certain grade level. Is it okay to hold both opinions? I don't know, but there you are.
 
posted 8:10 am PST | Permalink
 

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