AP Summary Piece on Marshall, Missouri Challenge to Pair of Graphic Novels

There's nothing new in this Associated Press piece on the debate in Marshall, Missouri whether or not to have Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Craig Thompson's Blankets on their shelves despite brief elements that may not be suitable for young children, but it's nice to have all of it in one place. The fact there is an AP article on the matter underlines the importance of the story, which the piece places in suitable context: libraries and graphic novels are a new relationship, an important one for each group, and one that was inevitable given libraries' pursuit of non-prose materials and comics' literary flowering. With that in mind, at one point a challenge to comics material was bound to break a little more widely so that the issues of suitability and what a library should do with graphic fiction and how we approach unfamiliar art could be explored. Here we are.

The article is way too evenhanded to dig into the merits of the "pornography" claim, the seemingly two-pronged nature of the objection as stated in the quote from the objecting party, and unfortunate things like the fact that as much as you can have a fair and open process, having such a process gets those books off the shelves if only for the duration of said process -- whether or not that's a laudatory or limiting stance is up to the individual reader.
 
posted 12:08 am PST | Permalink
 

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