it´s the latest thing to be nowhere

Depending on which side of Armagideon Time’s comics/music demographic divide you fall upon, you might have heard about Nymphet, a manga series about a prepubescent girl who attempts to seduce her teacher. (Oh, Japan, there are some things I’ll never understand about you, and it’s for the best. Really.) There had been plans for an American release of the series, but the publisher, who had picked up the rights for the series based on early Japanese installments (as is typical in the highly competitive world of manga localization), decided after a more in-depth review of the material to pull the plug on the project.

Dorian, who has retail experience in selecting and ordering manga titles, sums up the salient issues involved here, but comics fandom being the abattoir of reason that it is, it was inevitable that the shrill cries of “Boo! Censorship!” and “What about free speech, you fascist?” should arise, especially with the moldering corpses of similar straw men still fresh on the playing field from the Mary Jane statue and “Heroes for Hentai” controversies.

Here’s the thing – this has fuck all to do with “free speech.” I’m not sure when it happened, or how it happened (though I remember something similar erupting when EA axed the release of Thrill Kill in the late 1990’s) but there is a large vocal contingent of people working under the assumption that “free speech” means “speech free of consequences,” and are willfully ignorant that civil liberties and commercial considerations are two very different creatures. I would well be within my rights to compose a two hundred page litany of profanity, but that does not place any obligation upon any publishing house to see that work gets released to the public, nor does it exempt me from criticism – justified or not – regarding its contents.

Ideologically, I’m with John Milton on this score; I’m all for seeing a diverse multitude of literary vessels set loose upon the waves, and let the passage of time and intrinsic worth determine what shall sink and what shall float. Practically speaking, though, why should a small publisher, most of which operate on narrow financial margins, feel obligated to release a title that could, in this environment, cause serious legal repercussions, if not for themselves, then for the retailers who might carry the title? Plus there’s a risk that the potential media firestorm could poison the well for the rest of their line of goods. Even if the right on is on their side, the financial and temporal costs of litigation could, in all likelihood, make any victory a Pyrrhic one.

And for what, in this specific case? A comic that embodies the creepiest type of pandering to the vilest instincts of the fanboy crowd. “But that’s exactly where one must make a stand,” some may say. Fine. Let the benighted crusaders pool their funds together to buy the American release rights and publish the book themselves. It’s very easy to seize the moral high ground when one doesn’t have a personal stake in the outcome.

This may seem a bit Torquemadic of me, but the stridency of those arguing in favor of the release is disturbing in the extreme. Why such lengths for such an obviously inappropriate bit of fan service wank material? The past couple of weeks have dropped my already low estimation of lumpenfandom a dozen or so notches. The attempts to compare the artistic value of Lost Girls -- which was intended by Alan Moore as deliberate act of provocation -- and Nabokov’s Lolita -- which I suspect very few fans have actually read, though perhaps they Netflixed the 1997 film version and skipped straight to the salacious bits -- are fairly absurd. (The Lolita comparison especially amused me, seeing as how the novel is really about a self-deluded fool’s obsession with an unobtainable ideal – a pretty accurate summation of the pathetic side of comics fandom.)

Back to the idea of “speech free of consequences,” I find this tendency to associate criticism or disapproval with repression odious in the extreme. As it has been stated many times in the past couple of weeks, no one has the right to determine what someone else finds offensive. Some criticisms are more valid than others, to be sure, but that’s something to be hashed out via discussion and debate, not dismissed with a wave of the offending party’s hand and the customary weak bromide, “Get over it,” or through the use of loaded terms like “misconstrued” which attempt to deflect the issue back at the those doing the criticizing. The current of free expression is not a one way street, and getting called out on one’s crapulence – real, perceived, or somewhere in between – comes with the territory of expressing one’s self in the public arena.

Dubstar – Disgraceful (from Disgraceful, 1995)

Nikki and The Corvettes - You Make Me Crazy (from Nikki and The Corvettes, 1980)