A Comment On The CBLDF Consulting On The Christopher Handley Case

Late last week the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund signed on as a special consultant for a case in Iowa involving collector Christopher Handley, who is being prosecuted for the content of manga that he owns. This basically means they'll place their own specialized First Amendment expertise and legal resources at the service of Handley's defense team, and that they'll gather and perhaps provide expert testimony if the case comes to that. It's certainly something that falls within the Fund's mission, and reflects the greater cooperation between First Amendment organizations cultivated by current Executive Director Charles Brownstein.

The CBLDF press release doesn't get too deeply into the issue of what manga is at the heart of the case, only that it represents a small portion of Handley's overall collection. The case has no virtual footprint that I can find before the CBLDF's involvement, so it's hard to ascertain this information independently. Although I look forward to more details, in the end it's important we realize that those details don't matter as much as the principles -- not usually, and certainly not here. Handley may be a comics reader like you and me who digs deep into his wallet when the offering plate goes around at church and whose collection contains a few books where the stylization of manga makes some of the actions depicted look like they're taking place between underaged people. Handley may also be a rotten guy with a Hitler mustache who walks around wishing bad things happen to nice old ladies and puppies and who has as a part of his collection books so vile that one look might make one's hair fall out. Again: it doesn't matter. Either way. Bad law is bad law, no matter to whom it's been applied, and anything that targets private art collections is rotten, awful, pernicious law.

Comics people like equilibrium and being reasonable and seeing both sides of a matter and weighing the larger issues in terms of an overall good. Comics people at their best are independent-minded, sweetly dispositioned and big-hearted. The flipside is that they can become small-c conservative and overly judgmental, particularly when walking through the actions of others. One hopes as more details come out about the Handley case that it's the law at the center of the story, because it's the law that's at issue, not the central casting of who's run afoul of it. It's not about some abstract notion of who you'd let drive you to the airport just as the presidential elections really aren't about the person with whom you'd rather drink a beer. The moment we take our eyes off the greater issues of law and the parameters of our civilization and focus instead on building a narrative and trying to decide if we like the characters or not, we run the risk of having those narratives turned against us -- if not this one, the next one, if not that guy's story, then maybe someday yours.
 
posted 8:20 am PST | Permalink
 

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