"First they came..."
Once again I find myself putting politics ahead of productivity, and working on an anti-censorship piece. I'd like a little outside-of-my-head input on it.
It's a one-pager re-appropriating Martin Niemöller's "first they came for the communists..." quote, applying it to the slippery slope of censorship. I know: it's a false equivalence; censorship and execution are not the same thing. But his point about taking a stand before you are personally affected is relevant. In my piece, each panel except the last will use a (reasonably tasteful) example of the content being censored, with the narrator explaining why he didn't speak out in its defense. In the last he'll observe the he should have done so, at some point, because they just took something from him.
The question I have is this: which landmarks to use on the slippery slope I describe. Niemöller's standard version uses four stanzas, but for this medium (and this issue) I think six is a better number, if only to use a 6-panel grid. My problem is that I currently have seven steps, and I'm not entirely sure what order to put them in. I'm just self-aware enough to know that I have a poor sense of what squicks out other people the most. This is where all of you can help.
Tentatively, I have the narrator recounting the censorship of the following kinds of comics, in this order: lolicon, furry yiff, BDSM, gay porn, vanilla adults-only, mature readers, and something-he-reads. Is this the right order in terms of what the public would object to? (Note: I'm not asking where you personally might draw the line - that's not a debate I wish to have here - just the order you think most people would put them in.) And which one could I leave out, without leaving a gap, to bring it down to six panels?
It's a one-pager re-appropriating Martin Niemöller's "first they came for the communists..." quote, applying it to the slippery slope of censorship. I know: it's a false equivalence; censorship and execution are not the same thing. But his point about taking a stand before you are personally affected is relevant. In my piece, each panel except the last will use a (reasonably tasteful) example of the content being censored, with the narrator explaining why he didn't speak out in its defense. In the last he'll observe the he should have done so, at some point, because they just took something from him.
The question I have is this: which landmarks to use on the slippery slope I describe. Niemöller's standard version uses four stanzas, but for this medium (and this issue) I think six is a better number, if only to use a 6-panel grid. My problem is that I currently have seven steps, and I'm not entirely sure what order to put them in. I'm just self-aware enough to know that I have a poor sense of what squicks out other people the most. This is where all of you can help.
Tentatively, I have the narrator recounting the censorship of the following kinds of comics, in this order: lolicon, furry yiff, BDSM, gay porn, vanilla adults-only, mature readers, and something-he-reads. Is this the right order in terms of what the public would object to? (Note: I'm not asking where you personally might draw the line - that's not a debate I wish to have here - just the order you think most people would put them in.) And which one could I leave out, without leaving a gap, to bring it down to six panels?
Comments
There's the example Neil Gaiman always cites about his own first experience in falling afoul of censors--while adapting a section from the King James Bible.
http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html
As I think about it, the BDSM/vanilla divide comes up more in video than in comics, so it's probably less relevant here.
What I'm currently thinking is: lolicon, furries, gay porn, straight porn, mature readers, "yours".