Wolk at Wired and a Bad, Bad Law
June 21st, 2011
The always-sensible Douglas Wolk offers a solid round-up of issues surrounding comics and tablets for Wired this week.
Long time readers may find mostly familiar ground here, but it’s good to have someone put it all into perspective once in a while.
And the illustrations are pretty great.
Meanwhile, the CBLDF alerts us to a truly awful Tennessee law worth fighting. And as always, the CBLDF could use your help.
Stop by their site for news and some great premiums and special events coming up.
[via Spurge]
March 3, 2021
This is… insane. Is, say, “Bambi” now illegal in Tennessee? The images of the forest fire and the death of Bambi’s mother are surely meant to cause ’emotional distress’ — and as any parent who’s been in a theater full of crying children (and not a few crying parents) can tell you, are very successful.
How about, say, pictures at the Holocaust Museum? Again, the images are selected to cause a certain level of ’emotional distress’.
Inflicting temporary emotional distress is the heart of catharsis in art, and the heart of certain forms of persuasion. Are these now illegal in Tennessee? Egads.
If the law passes, can I make this go away? ‘Cause it’s causing me emotional distress.
Wow…and this isn’t the first law like this for them!
“The ban on distressing images…is also an update to existing law. Tennessee law already made it a crime to make phone calls, send emails, or otherwise communicate directly with someone in a manner the sender “reasonably should know” would “cause emotional distress” to the recipient. If the communciation lacked a “legitimate purpose,” the sender faced jail time.”
I just…can’t believe it!
I’m terribly interested in Mr. Wolk’s article as a person who is on both sides of the digital comics story: a reader and producer of.
I have long noted deep, deep resistance to digital comics from all corners, the producer corner, the reader corner and most obviously, the retailer corner. But to some extent, I do not understand said resistance–one would think that only retailers, distributors and others who trade in the physical comic medium would have anything to lose. It’s very perplexing to me.