The duo represent "a wish dream of two homosexuals living together," Wertham wrote.
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It's widely understood that the creation of the Comics Code Authority was in response to the 1954 publication of Fredrik Wertham's minor bestseller, Seduction of the Innocent, which suggested, among other things, that Batman and Robin were essentially the first queer couple of comics and encouraged young readers to replicate their deviant behavior.
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(There's a reason Hal Sparks' Michael Novotny in Queer as Folk, the popular and influential Showtime television series from the early 2000s, owns and operates a comic book store, where his creation of Rage, featuring a gay superhero, fuels many of the show's plotlines.) And many who didn't were accused of it. Of course, many writers and artists worked around the Comics Code Authority, sneaking subtle hints or homosexual subtext into their books prior to 1989. Lippincott was quickly followed by Turbo Charge, Spectral, Willow and Tara and Kennedy from Buffy, and Archie's Kevin Keller, along with dozens of others. He died in 1990 of AIDS-related causes, and with him went the industry's squeamishness. That was the same year that Andy Lippincott, a character Garry Trudeau introduced to Doonesbury more than a decade earlier, was diagnosed with HIV. It wasn't until 1989-more than a decade after Harvey Milk became the first openly gay politician to be elected to American office, and years after Randy Shilt's And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic became a best-seller, pushed further forward by adoring reviews-that the Comics Code Authority, established to self-regulate comic books in the United States, was amended to allow for non-stereotypical depictions of gay men and lesbians. (Even before Tim Cook replaced Jobs, Apple made headlines for coming in first place among technology companies in a survey asking gay and lesbian participants to rank gay-friendly brands.) The irony here is that the comic book industry, many fanatics of which are responsible for fueling yesterday's anti-Apple attack, on the other hand, was famously slow to accept non-traditional character traits, or at least those within the realm of possibility-even if it is OK with depictions of anal sex now (sometimes with a champagne bottle-check out issue #4 of Saga, but not while you're at work).
They may be doing a lot of things wrong (the company has an inconsistent record of enforcing its strict anti-porn policy-the late Steve Jobs once told a customer that "folks who want porn can buy an Android"), but Apple, whose Steve Jobs replacement has been called the most powerful gay man in Silicon Valley, has never been seriously questioned for its acceptance of homosexuality. (And it was quick because, while writing this in the Pacific Standard offices, I feared someone would look over my shoulder and report me to HR.) Past issues of the comic have shown heterosexual orgies, visits to the sex-resort planet of Sextillion, child prostitution, robot sex, and oh so much more.
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A quick tour through Saga's archive can be shocking. "Based on our understanding of those policies, we believed that Saga #12 could not be made available in our app, and so we did not release it today."ĬomiXology interpreted Apple's policies, then, as being unfriendly to gay pornographic imagery, but welcoming of all the hardcore scenes depicted in issues 1 through 11 of the series. "As a partner of Apple, we have an obligation to respect its policies for apps and the books offered in apps," he wrote. In " Concluding the Saga #12 saga" (though this is far from over), David Steinberger confessed that it was his company that banned the comic and apologized to its creators. It would be a sad place to find itself-except that Apple, we now know, never even saw the comic.Īfter just about every digital-first publication, from Business Insider to The Atlantic denounced "the foolishness of Apple's decision," the founder of ComiXology, the platform through which Saga would have been distributed by Apple, released a statement that contradicted Vaughan's.