Robot 6
Banned Books Week: Challenged graphic novels
The Huffington Post has a list of the 10 most popular graphic novels that have been challenged in libraries. The list purports to be from the American Library Association, but I can’t find it on their site; I suspect they pulled the graphic novels off several lists of challenged books. Here they are:
• Absolute Sandman, by Neil Gaiman and others
• Blankets, by Craig Thompson
• Bone, by Jeff Smith
• Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel
• Maus, by Art Spiegelman
• Pride of Baghdad, by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon
• Tank Girl, by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin
• The Dark Knight Strikes Again, by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier, by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
• Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Notably absent from the list is any mention of manga, which has been challenged in several libraries recently.
6 Comments
Tom Bowman
September 30, 2010 at 10:18 am
Are they trying to ban these books or simply label them as adult reading? There’s a big difference between censorship and rating
DrewT
September 30, 2010 at 10:38 am
Tom, they’re called “book challenges, which are formal written requests to remove a book from a library or classroom because of an objection to the book’s content. “
Tom Bowman
September 30, 2010 at 10:52 am
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification!
Dru Tan
September 30, 2010 at 12:34 pm
Bone? Really? Someone still wants to ban Bone? What a dick.
Nawid A.
September 30, 2010 at 4:34 pm
People were apparently uncomfortable with the scene where Bone meets Thorn if I remember correctly.
Honestly, the scene is pretty innocent and it is far from explicit. Any kid or adult who is deriving a nastier subtext has had those ideas for a while.
finette
September 5, 2012 at 9:12 am
ALA contributed the HuffPo post themselves–see their logo at the top? If you click on that, you can see the other posts they’ve done (not many).