Banned Books Week Ends, Banning Books Continues
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Jennifer Pinkowski -- School Library Journal, 10/20/2006
Just a few days after Banned Books Week ended on September 30, two well-respected graphic novels—Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Houghton, 2006) and Craig Thompson's Blankets (Top Shelf, 2003)—came under fire for being "pornographic" at a public hearing on October 4 at the Marshall Public Library in central Missouri. A week later, the library's Board of Trustees voted to temporarily remove both books while it hashes out a policy on how materials are selected.
Library Director Amy Crump told SLJ's sister publication, Library Journal, she had one standard for selecting books: quality. Both books were given high reviews in that magazine's pages. SLJ recommended Blankets for older high school students and didn't review Fun Time, as it is considered adult material.
The Marshall Library's shelving of both books followed these classifications. Neither book was readily accessible to young readers. The 600-page Blankets, which details Thompson's childhood spent in, and his eventual disenchantment with, strict Catholicism, was found in the Young Adult shelves, which is separate from the children's section. Bechdel's Fun Home, which documents the author's growing up with a distant mother and a possibly closeted funeral-director father, was found in Adult Biographies. The titles are two of the 75 graphic novels in the library's 30,000-volume collection.
When he was alerted to Blankets' banning by an editor at Comicsreporter.com, "at first I thought it was funny—how quaint," says Thompson. "And then I thought, Wow—I thought we had progressed beyond that point in literature."
As a big fan of Bechdel's, who is well-known for her long-running strip Dykes to Watch Out For (collected in multiple volumes from Firebrand Books), Thompson says he is in good company. But he remains mystified as to what, exactly, offended some Marshall residents about the books. "I was initially amused that a whole town hall meeting had gathered. And then I wondered, what's in [Bechdel's] book? I went and got it down off the shelf to find what they were offended by—what they would have projected on the big screen," he laughs.
Regarding his own work, Thompson puts the ban in the context of a larger political chasm. "It amplifies my sensation of what's going on in America right now—the division," he says. A resident of liberal Portland, OR, Thompson is currently visiting his family in Wisconsin, and "I'm in Bush country now," he says. "When Bush got re-elected, we were very confused in Portland. But once I traveled to other parts of the country, I thought, Bush is a hero here. I don't know how to describe it. I guess I thought about Blankets being something in the middle. A lot of my fans are pastors and self-professed Christian conservatives, and everyone else, too. It seemed like people could meet in this middle ground."
Fun Home and Blankets will remain off Marshall's shelves while the library creates its first materials selection policy. Weekly meetings, open to the public, are scheduled from October 26 through November 29. Once that policy is in place, the books will meet their fate.
Despite the controversy, Thompson says, "I am quite honored that it's in libraries in a lot of different places. For this library where it's been pulled from the shelves, there are so many that do carry the book."
