Kim at SJMA

Here's a short announcement about my lunchtime talk at the San Jose Museum of Art in conjunction with the Crumb Genesis show 9/7 at noon. I saw Crumb speak about this work last Halloween at the SF JCC, and posted about it here.

R. Crumb
The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, 2009 (Chapter 1, page 1)
Pen and ink on paper; 14 3⁄4 × 11 1⁄2 inches
Courtesy the artist, Paul Morris, and David Zwirner, New York
Photo: Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. From the web site
for the Genesis Illustrated exhibition, San Jose Museum of Art.

More App Censorship News

Given the issues we experienced with controversial images on our Comix Classics iPhone app, I was happy to see that Apple has loosen up a bit on LGBT-themed comics that seemed to have nothing objectionable going on.  As reported by the Comics Beat, Teleny and Camille, Glamazonia: The Uncanny Super-Tranny, and Rainy Day Recess: The Complete Steven’s Comics were finally approved after a year of wrangling. As you can see at the link and in the screen shot below, these are pretty tame.

A page of colorable valentine's cards from
Rainy Day Recess: The Complete Steven's Comics.

Underground comix have always been controversial, as they often depicted sex, violence and outrageous jokes in order to provoke a response from the reader. Apple's choices in what was ok or rejected was maddeningly inconsistent. I can understand that violent and sexual imagery like S. Clay Wilson's Head First might not be to everyone's taste. But some of the images rejected were very PG, such as Will Elder's cover for Snarf #10, based on Theodore Gericault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa or a Frank Stack page with a very subtle nude. Yet Joel Beck's One Dong's Family, a parody of a stereotypical Leave it to Beaver type family featuring anthropomorphic genitalia as the main characters was ok?

I'd like to thank other sites have picked up the Comix Classics/iPhone story building on the Imprint article by Michael Dooley: The Comics Reporter, Comics Beat, Anime News Network, The Publisher's Weekly Daily RoundUp,  ICv2 and Comic Book Resources.