Southern Exposure
The case of Georgia vs. comics-store owner Gordon Lee, who is accused of corrupting children.
by Justin Clark
February 12, 2007
Some are born posthumously, Fredrick Nietzsche once claimed. In the world of comics, some are porn posthumously — Picasso, specifically, whose famous painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon has helped create a legal nightmare for a Georgia comic-book retailer and raised questions about the state of free expression in the industry.
Gordon Lee's trouble began on Halloween of 2004, the night he gave away thousands of free comics to trick-or-treaters at Legends, his Rome, Georgia comic shop. One of the free titles, Alternative Comics #2, contained an excerpt from comic artist Nick Bertozzi's soon-to-be-published graphic novel The Salon, a murder mystery set in fin-de-siecle Paris. In a handful of frames, Picasso is depicted painting in the nude as he unveils his pioneering Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) for fellow cubist Georges Braque.
Not everyone appreciated Bertozzi's history lesson, however, including the parents of a nine-year-old child who received the comic. Despite Lee's immediate apology, Georgia prosecutor Leigh Patterson has spent the past three years pursuing Lee under a controversial statute that prohibits the knowing dissemination of images of "sexually explicit nudity, sexual conduct, and sadomasochistic abuse" to minors. Patterson's office did not respond to a request for comment.
Lee's defenders say the law doesn't apply to Lee's case, however, as his distribution of the comic was accidental, and because the comic's nudity is hardly sexual. More broadly, Lee's lawyers claim the law is unconstitutional in general. "It makes illegal things not intended to be illegal," says Alan Begner, Lee's lawyer, who will be the first to challenge the law on appeal.
Begner's claim is that the law's definition of sexually explicit nudity, which extends to simple images of breasts and buttocks, is too broad. It remains to be seen whether the judge hearing Lee's case later this month will agree. In the meantime, the comics industry is paying careful attention to a case that could well redefine the way artists, publishers and retailers do business.
Lee's case is not The People v. Larry Flynt; no one has claimed that The Salon is obscene, or even that comic retailers should be prohibited from selling obviously sexually explicit material such as Hustler. Instead of outright censorship, Begner says, at issue is whether retailers can carry more mature titles, without fearing that a mistake like Lee's could earn them legal trouble. (Lee faces up to a year in jail and a $1,000 fine for each of the three counts against him.)
According to Begner, the case partly stems from the ambiguity of the standards for protecting minors from an accidental collision with the naked human form. Movie theaters require parental accompaniment to films with nudity, in part because pornographic films developed contemporaneously with Hollywood fare. Art museums, on the other hand, are historically founded around the idea that nudity in art transcends prurient interest. Because many comics are primarily aimed at children, the public tends to forget the existence of mature titles like R. Crumb's. Bertozzi says that misconception has made life hard for artists who want to tackle more sophisticated themes.
"The Disneyfication of culture has helped contribute to that lack of understanding," says The Salon's artist. "I think people unfortunately see cartoons and they see a nice thick line — a lot of cartoonists including myself are influenced by that nice thick line. It's assumed to be childlike."
That misconception helps explain why the first U.S. obscenity trial in the visual arts was directed a comic book. In 1991, underground cartoonist Mike Diana allegedly left behind one of his comics in a Xerox copier at the Florida school where he worked as a janitor. After the comic's gory and sexual images were shown to authorities, Diana was charged and subsequently convicted of obscenity. According to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), who helped take up Diana's unsuccessful appeal, the jury that convicted Diana agreed that his work "lacked serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." Ironically, one of the yardsticks of that value was Picasso's Guernica.
The CBLDF has now taken up Lee's case, spending more than $70,000 on his defense, and succeeding in persuading the court to drop the two felony counts Lee faced, as well as three of the five misdemeanors. Lee now faces a third set of charges as he goes to trial. While some contributors to the fund objected to getting involved, executive director Charles Brownstein says he had no reservations about taking up Lee's cause.
"His prosecution is unjust, and a conviction would have a chilling effect upon other retailers in Georgia," Brownstein says, noting that the Fund's existence is owed to a case quite similar to Lee's. In 1986, police seized a number of titles from a store owned by Illinois comics-retailer Frank Mangiaricina, and arrested the store's manager for displaying "obscene" materials. One of the officers, Sgt. Jack Hoestra, later told the Gary Post-Tribune that, "There was absolutely a lot of satanic influence in the comics there. If you know what you're looking for, you can see the satanic influence all over. Three-quarters of the rock groups today show satanic influence, and it's all over the television."
It was then that CBLDF founder Denis Kitchen became concerned. "I realized immediately that if police officers with built-in Satan detectors could get away with making arrests and seizing objectionable comic books, much more than the comics industry was at stake," Kitchen recalls.
Attacks on the comic-book industryhave historically reflected the dominant anxiety — paranoia, perhaps — that the public has about the safety of its children: Satanic cults in the 1980s, sexual predation now. The first backlash against comics commenced in the late 1940s, culminating in congressional hearings that examined the superhero genre's alleged role in promoting juvenile delinquency.
In 1954, the industry chose to circumvent potential government censorship throughself-regulation, imposing a moral code on itself that included such gems as this one: "Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals." And if that didn't make the moral purpose of comics clear: "In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds."
Inevitably, however, "evil" did triumph, or at least moral complexity. Alternative comics that dared to depict violence, nudity and sex were originally distributed primarily through head shops, but they have long since found their way onto to the shelves of conventional comics stores like Lee's. In recent years, the Comics Code has become increasingly irrelevant, with DC submitting only two of its lines for approval, and Marvel declining to participate entirely. Neither Lee nor his lawyers can speak about the details of the night Alternative Comics #2 found its way into the hands of a minor, but it's unlikely that anyone would notice the comic book lacked the once ubiquitous Comics Code seal.
Regardless of how Lee's case turns out, it is unlikely to revive anything like a formal Comics Code. But according to Brownstein, it doesn't need to. "I think a conviction in this case could make artists second-guess their creation, creating a de facto self-censorship," he says.
Bertozzi is less concerned about self-censorship than self-consciousness. He says drawing Picasso nude was an instinctive gesture: a way of expressing an aspect of the character's personality.
"It's shorthand for someone who's monofixated and ego-maniacal," says Bertozzi, who once managed a comics store in Philadelphia, and says he sympathizes with Lee. Though Bertozzi isn't in any legal trouble himself, he says the lawsuit may impact his story-telling.
"The case has influenced me to the point where if I'm going to draw a scene where there's nudity, I think I will be saddled with the knowledge that there will be people out there misinterpreting it," Bertozzi says. Still, he acknowledges, the flap surrounding The Salon is likely to help sales in April, when the book is published. He compares the situation to the outcry surrounding the Brooklyn Museum's Sensation show in the late 1990's. When the museum displayed a Madonna accessorized with elephant excrement, former mayor Rudolph Giuliani unsuccessfully called for an end to the museum's public funding.
"What was the real outcome?" asks Bertozzi. "Giuliani gets a bump in the poll numbers and looks good to his conservative base, the artist oddly enough benefits from it too, gets hundreds and thousands of people seeing his art work, and even the Brooklyn Museum probably benefited as well."
In the case of Georgia v. Gordon Lee, there is one major difference, Bertozzi points out.
"In this case, someone is getting hurt," he says. "His name is Gordon Lee."
©2007 Justin Clark and hooksexup.com