Maryland Kids Safe From Goku’s Peeny

After the complaints of a local politician about the content of Dragon Ball Vol. 1, the series has been removed from all school libraries in Wicomico County, Maryland, that locale's superintendent office announced late last week. I'm a great fan of that series, so I'm distressed by its dismissal as trash during the kerfuffle and the apparent orientation of educators involved that comics have value as reading matter for stupid and/or reluctant people as opposed to value of their own. I also despise culture warmongering in general, and this has elements of that.

At the same time, I find something it almost more encouraging that the system is making a choice on a series rather than their previous state of having no idea what was in their library. The fact that the book didn't seem to find an eloquent, on-the-ground defender -- I'd be happy to make that kind of defense, but I don't live there -- just makes me wonder after how they and organizations like them routinely procure books. I'm also sympathetic to people not wanting their younger children to have access to the brief nudity and sexual discomfit jokes in at least the book in question. I guess my ideal would have been for them to keep the series for older readers and to stumble towards some sort of recognition of its value based on why they shelved it in the first place.

There's an interesting post here by guide author and English-language manga expert Jason Thompson on the difficulty of editing content with those kinds of books, namely way devoted fans reject what they perceive as an inauthentic experience of those books.
 
posted 8:30 am PST | Permalink
 

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