I’ve tripped and fallen across half a dozen links this morning about censorship and labeling and adult material and so on. I figure that’s a sign, so I’m throwing these out for you to check out. Keep in mind that various links may or may not be nsfw.

-Steve Bissette has been doing a great series of retrospectives on a comics controversy from 1986/1987. I came across it via a link to Colleen Doran’s blog, where she discusses her role in the controversy. Bissette has several (prologue, 1, 2, 3, 4) posts up currently, all of which are worth reading. Bissette’s got a really engaging style of writing and does a pretty good job of collating all this data. It’s a fun history lesson.

-Molly Crabapple’s new book, Scarlett Takes Manhattan, is not being carried by Barnes & Noble for being “too pornographic.” Amazon’s got it, though.

-There’s an amendment to a child porn law in Japan being proposed right now that’ll “restrict sexually provocative, “visual depictions” of characters who sound or appear to be 18 years old or younger.” My understanding is that it is broadly worded, poorly researched, and unconstitutional. Yoshitoshi ABe has a particularly interesting opposition to the amendment, and a few dozen manga creators and publishers on Twitter have vocalized their opposition.

I usually hate empty linkblogging, but I’m still organizing my thoughts. I figure I’ll have something tomorrow or the day after. I will say that I am generally anti-labeling/ratings- I don’t think that you can apply a system with an objective scale to something as subjective as art, be it written, drawn, painted, scrawled, filmed, or programmed.