The Tease of Things I Don't Need

Censorship: Torn Screaming From Today's Comic Strips

(Thanks for Mark Gibson for alerting me to this one.)

I continue to live in areas where the daily newspaper isn't worth one's time and money, and the nearest newspaper of any any note is the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is (understandably) largely consumed with news more of interest to Phildelphia, so I've given that a pass, too. In the end I seldom found the time for a daily paper anyway, so it became a wasteful outlay of money for what was ultimately a daily source of clutter. Besides, so many newspapers are accessible online that I tend to skim for information each day, and this has worked out increasingly well for me. One consequence of not having the daily paper as part of my life, though, is that I have virtually no contact with daily comics strips. The last time I followed any comics strips daily was over 20 years ago, and offhand I couldn't tell you which ones they were. It was all very casual, and I didn't have much in the way of favorites.

So, I was unaware of a recent turn in Funky Winkerbean, involving the arrest of a comics shop owner for selling an item considered to be indecent. The arc began last Thursday, and if you go there you can select the next day's strip in turn and bring yourself up to date. I have no idea how far Tom Batiuk intends to take this in terms of confronting the "issue", such as it is, of "adult" comics. The general scenario has played out several times in legal battles the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has been involved in over the years, so there's no shortage of real life situations for Batiuk to draw on.

Based on the less than one week old stretch of this arc he's putting the comics shop in a good light - the owner doesn't seem creepy in the least, the (unnamed and essentially unseen) adult comics are in a clearly marked, elevated section, and the woman who buys one of them is plainly of an age where the clerk wouldn't mention anything about the content, especially with a child (who's been talking superhero continuity with the clerk) present. The woman seems to be gleefully prudish, not the least outraged. She gives every indication of simply wanting to see the shop ownder taken out and pilloried, not actually interested in protecting the community from some cultural abomination, so she makes the purchase and rushes off to the authorities.

What throws me a little, though, is that based on appearance, and that the character guide lists John Howard (second guy sitting at the counter, with a pony tail and a Batman shirt - it's a Flash page so placing one's mouse pointer over the character provides a pop-up name and mini-bio) as running Komix Korner, a comics shop above the Chinese restaurant. The shop we're taken to for the current storyline, however, is in the basement under Montoni's (the pizzeria setting for the snapshot of characters in the character guide above) , and so far is unnamed. That Batiuk has chosen either a hitherto unknown character or one of such rare appearance that he didn't make the character guide has me wondering where he's going to take this. This could easily mean that he intends to make a very dark statement about the power of censorship and the forces that immediately align the moment someone suggests a possible "threat" to children, no matter how unsubstantiated. This comics shop owner may very well be in for such a tragically rough ride that Batiuk didn't want to do it to an established character such as John Howard. In the meantime, I'll leave it to longtime readers to say whether or not this character and his shop have even been mentioned before in the nearly 33-year run of the strip. Being situated in the basement of what is apparently a community touchstone it would seem odd that this would be the first mention of him.

Of course, for all I know the character guide page (noted as being from 2002) may simply be out of date. John Howard might have moved his shop from one locale to another, gotten different glasses and a different haircut that better conceals his hairline. (I was going to show them both here, but the old Print Scrn trick for capturing an image isn't working with that flash page.) Again, I'll leave it to the solid fans of the strip (not to mention the rest of the arc, when names will almost certainly start being named now that an arrest has been made) to let me know the truth.