Farliga och förbjudna serietidningar: 50-talets seriekritiker och deras efterföljare

I Henrika Ringboms intervju [i boken Jorden går under] berättar Tove Jansson att Ny Tid-läsarnas klagomål tvingade henne att avsluta den första muminserien snabbare än hon hade tänkt sig. Bland annat ska läsarna ha ogillat att muminpappan höll sig med Monarkistbladet.
Det är en kul historia.

Så kul, att man kan fråga sig hur sann den är.

Mot historien talar att seriens intrig ganska noga följer den bakomliggande bokens, Kometjaktens. En del är omarbetat, annorlunda, och själva texten är kortare. Men någon plötsligt påkommen, avslutande vändning ser man inte.

Och vad Monarkistbladet beträffar löper serien på i tidningen i sex månaders tid efter att publikationen i fråga nämnts, i den allra första strippen (och bara där). Det låter inte som ett scenario för en läsarstorm.

Vida del Che was immediately banned after its publication by the ruling military dictatorship at the time, self-styled as "Argentine Revolution" (1966-1973); the whole edition was kidnapped and destroyed by the dictatorship. Nevertheless, the original drawings were saved and hidden by Enrique Breccia, and it was finally republished in 2008.

When the Italian journalist Alberto Ongaro enquired about Oesterheld's disappearance in 1979, he received the reply: "We did away with him because he wrote the most beautiful story of Ché Guevara ever done".

I første halvdel af 1950'erne førte en stor del af den danske kulturelle og politiske elite kampagne mod "kulørt litteratur" i almindelighed og tegneserier i særdeleshed. Kampagnen blev anført af Danmarks Lærerforening med viceinspektør Christian Winther i spidsen og havde som idé, at seriebøger og tegneserier virkede moralsk og intellektuelt fordærvende på børn og unge.
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Offentlig afbrænding af den postuleret skadelige litteratur var en udbredt amerikansk aktionsform, som i hvert fald i et enkelt tilfælde også blev benyttet i Danmark.
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Som led i kampen mod den kulørte litteratur bragte Folkeskolen i nr. 27 1955 nedenstående amatørfoto fra en Skt. Hans aften på Vesterbro i København. Ledsageteksten lød:

"De kulørte helte på bålet. Her brændes Fantomet på ungdommens Skt. Hans-bål i Enghaveparken på Vesterbro i København. "Københavnerungdom gør det hedt for kulørte 'helte' ", står der på skiltet. Gid det må være mere end en tom demonstration! Pæne bladhuse, der tjener penge på braset, kunne passende følge eksemplet fra Allers etablissement, indtil de ansvarlige myndigheder får sig taget sammen til at nægte valuta til importen."

Serieautodafé

"USA:s främsta lektyr", som de allt dominerande serierna kallats, brändes häromdagen högtidligt på bål av 600 skolbarn i Spencer, vilka samtidigt lika högtidligt lovade att de aldrig skulle komma att ens glutta på en serieteckning.

Att Stålmannen, Karl Alfred, Blondie et Co på detta medeltida sätt gick sin död till mötes vid en autodafé, vid vilken sammanlagt 2 000 serier och serietidningar brändes, beror dock inte så mycket på barnen själva. Den drivande kraften var nämligen ett lärar- och föräldramöte som anordnats i staden för att få slut på "landsplågan".

In the fall of 1948, in the remote coal mining town of Spencer, West Virginia, an eighth grader named David Mace led a book burning behind his school. “We are met here today to take a step which we believe will benefit ourselves, our community, and our country,” Mace explained to a crowd of more than six hundred students and adults, in a speech that his teacher had helped him write. He drew a matchbook from the pocket of his best pants and set the pile ablaze. Flames leapt twenty-five feet in the crisp autumn air. The crowd watched the immolation for more than an hour; some of the children began to cry.

The books Mace was burning weren’t communist tracts or evolution textbooks. They were comic books. Urged on by a teacher, Mace had spent almost a month leading students in a door-to-door campaign, collecting more than two thousand comics, which they then piled six feet high and reduced to smoldering ash. Though this wasn’t the first time there had been a comic-book burning in the United States, it was the first to gain national attention. Soon, comic-book burnings had become commonplace, mostly in small towns like Spencer. As David Hajdu puts it in The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America, the “panic over comic books fell somewhere between the Red Scare and the frenzy over UFOs in the pathologies of postwar America.”

In October 1948, the students of Spencer Graded School in Roane County, West Virginia, gained national attention when thirteen-year-old David Mace led his classmates in “burial rites” for their comic books. Newspapers cast Mace, costumed in black slacks and a white shirt, as a grave and sober preacher figure. Mace solemnly reminded the school’s six hundred students that they were meeting “here today to take a step which we believe will benefit ourselves, our community and our country.” Comic books, he said, “are mentally, physically, and morally injurious to boys and girls, [and] we propose to burn those in our possession.”

The “cremation” represented the culmination of a month-long campaign in which Mace, an eighth grader recruited to the cause by his reading teacher, Mabel Riddel, who devoted one class each week to Bible study, had led more than 250 students in a door-to-door collection drive that netted two thousand comic books.
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The first reported comic-book burning took place in November of 1945 in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, a town of eleven thousand located about a hundred miles north of Madison. The children of Saints Peter and Paul School torched 1,567 comic books accumulated during a school-sponsored collection drive, all titles which a Catholic censor had classified as “condemned” (Batman, The Green Hornet, Wonder Woman) or “questionable” (Dick Tracy, Orphan Annie, L’il Abner). Two years later, students at Chicago’s St. Gall’s School burned three thousand comics after a collection drive organized at the impetus of a ten-year-old student.

These incidents at first received little national attention. The fervor for destroying comic books only caught fire when Frederic Wertham brought the issue to the fore in the spring of 1948.

"Maus," the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the experiences of Holocaust survivors, has been removed from an eighth-grade English language arts curriculum by a Tennessee school board over concerns about "rough, objectionable language" and a drawing of a nude woman.

The McMinn County Board of Education voted 10-0 to remove the book from the curriculum, saying it should be replaced, if possible, with another book without content deemed objectionable.
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"I'm trying to, like, wrap my brain around it," Spiegelman said on CNN's "New Day" when asked for his reaction in an interview Thursday.

"I moved past total bafflement to try to be tolerant of people who may possibly not be Nazis, maybe," the author said, noting it did not appear based on the meeting that the board wanted the book removed because the author was Jewish.

"They're totally focused on some bad words that are in the book," he said. "I can't believe the word 'damn' would get the book jettisoned out of the school on its own."