In my neighbourhood
This gem is on the rear of a sportsground shed facing a creek and then a forest. Very few people would see it. 
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DAN CLOWES COMIC BOOK CAUSES FUROR IN CONNECTICUT
American Children being brought up by brainless bullying parents. Something should be done about it.
Parents like Jenny Ginns are outraged that a teacher provided a comic book to a freshman student..."If that was my daughter that came home and showed this to me I honestly believe my husband would hurt the man," said Amy.
The girl’s mother said her daughter has been "crying every night" and asking not to go to school because students who liked the teacher are blaming her. "He’s the cool, favorite teacher of all the kids," the father said. His wife said she became especially concerned when her daughter told her Fisher asked her "how the book made her feel," although the mother added that she has no idea "what his intention was."
What I don't get is: How did the parents know anything about this? Don't kids know how to keep secrets any more? My father once confiscated a James Bond paperback I picked up at a garage sale when I was about ten. From that moment on I reallised that my reading adventures needed to be done in secrecy. I started by reading all the James Bond novels, at first trying to psychoanalyse my father, figuring out exactly what it was about the book that worried him. If my dad's reading this, I'm sure he can't remember anything about it.
Charles Brownstein, executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in New York City, said that Clowes is a well known graphic novelist. "The book (Ice Haven) was basically a profile of a town and its various oddball personalities and it was drawn in a wide variety of illustrative styles to create a psychological portrait of the goings on in this town," Brownstein said. "It certainly is not pornographic." He added: "Frankly, I find the fact that somebody has left their job over this particular work deeply troubling."
I love to compare the way Charles expresses it in his official capacity with the way he'll express it next time I talk to him in a bar.
(links via Tom Spurgeon)
Labels: in my neighbourhood
posted by Eddie Campbell at
02:12
9 Comments:
Oh dear. Here we go again.
What would have happened if wee six-year-old hayley campbell went to school in Connecticut and cheerily handed in her homework written on the back of photocopies of From Hell pages (because they were in the spare paper pile along with all the other shite) as she did in sunny Queensland? What would they have made of the graphic disembowelment, the prostitution, the foul language, and --
GOOD GOD NO! --- THE PEGO!
"B-b-but it's only a willy, miss....miss? Can you hear me?"
You see, those news articles support my belief that people are stupid. It's a very serious condition that threatens the very fabric of our society and must be dealt with. How? By desensitising stupid pedantic people to violence by increasing the number of violent and inappropriate shows on television..... then, when their defenses are down, spiriting them away in the manner of Chinese counter-revolutionaries in the Maoist period. Release is optional.
I would be a f*cking great dictator.
And hayley; I just handed in my horror comic for final HSC art marking (which includes Gaiman's character Morpheus, 'appropriated'), and it includes disembowelment, violence, drug abuse, suicidal themes, explicit swearing, and some vaguely necrophiliac connotations that only showed up when I looked over it later. Teacher was pleased. Students were afraid. Even if it gets high marks it is prohibited from being exhibited anywhere by the Board of Studies. I had to include a letter from my parents saying that I was neither crazy nor suicidal.
Not quite a six-year-old's-recycled-paper incident, but enough to make people question my mental state.
By the way, what DID your Queensland teachers make of those recycled From Hell sheets?
you handed the rest of your homework in written on the back of a shite?
Steph,
Mostly the photocopies were highly magnified. The teachers would squint at it, turn it around, hold it an arm's length away, trying to determine whether it really was the belly of a prostitute sans reproductive organs (which it simply-could-not-be-there-must-be-some-perfectly-reasonable-explanation-for-this), or perhaps just a shitty photograph of the Grand Canyon.
I never got in trouble. The only time questions were asked was when Dad used up the chalk drawing Professor Bean on the blackboad in the early morning empty classroom.
Why does Breach get to call himself the Bouncer's Pego, nae bother, but you yelled at Wankstain Anonymous?
LARRY DAVID IS ANONYMOUS!
DISCLAIMER:
This comment has no point.
"Rache?" Hmm... must've been a girl named "Rachel" who got iterrupted.
Have you read "A Study in Scarlet" by Conan Doyle, bill?
Unfortunately, there's an epidemic of hysteria in this country, due to the fact that there seem to be so many teachers (female more the male) who are sleeping with there under age students. I am frequently giving comics to my students, and have never had a problem, because I always show their parents what I'm giving them, first. "See. Nothing up my sleeve." As a result, I've found the parents to be very open to what their kids see. Of course, I'm in California. People are a bit more open minded here, in some respects. This is more to do with peoples fondness for faked outrage, if you ask me.
In defense of my born and bred native land, this is pathetic. The obsession we Americans have with this hearth and home happy horseshit is just in contrast to the decaying of most families over here. So, like any good society, we choose to focus on the most ridiculous culprits as serious threats. I mean, Dan Clowes of all people? Jesus. But good job, America for continuing to discipline teachers for having human connections with their students.
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