The publication of the book Out of the Gutters. Obscenity, Censorships and Transgression in American Comics (2025) happens at a time where concerns about the imposition of a moral cultural code in the US are rising. In the Foreword, Frederick Luis Aldama reminds the readers of the censorship systems put into place by governmental and religious authorities in America, Asia, and Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Aldama explains that to focus on obscenity and comics allows one to analyze the shift in social attitudes allowing/disallowing one's connection to comics, “dislocating one's engagement and evaluation from the aesthetic to the domain of ethics” (XII). In the introduction, the editors bring up the urgency of studying the obscenity discourse in the United States to acknowledge the targeting and marginalization of specific communities such as B.I.P.O.C and LGBTQIA2S+ folks. Under a historical lens, the authors extensively explain and comment upon major cases that influenced the obscenity discourse such as Roth v. United States (1957) and Miller v. California (1973). Doing so, they locate them in the larger discourse of legal obscenity concerning fictive and storytelling media. This well-documented section is a nest of historical and cultural resources for the readers. Stepping aside from the legal frame, the authors draw on Bataille's concept of “Nakedness” and Kristeva's “dream logic” as a transgressive process to explain how obscenity can be regarded as an experience and not only as a legal category of political dividing line. In this collection of essays, the Pictorial/Iconic turn in the humanities (W.J.T. Mitchell) and its relationship to the shift in social attitude towards comics in the United States remains in the background. A greater attention to this turn would help situate the discourse on obscenity and comics into a wider cultural and social context while drawing links between the medium and its relationship to academia at a very early stage. Nevertheless, Lawrence and Santos highlight the urgency for scholarly work addressing “how obscenity discourses, which draw an artificial line between text and image, apply to comics, which self-consciously merges them” (18). The “Timeline of significant events” (from 1859 to 2021) located at the end of the introduction focuses on cases, publications, and legal matters related to censorship and comics in the US. It is of great interest for the readers trying to contextualize a well-known event or in search of less commonly known episodes of social debates on censorship in the US. The volume is divided in three parts. The first part, “Out of the Gutters: Comics' History of Obscenity” comprises four essays that analyze the relationship between histories of obscenity and their impact both on the individual life of the artists and on the development of the industry of comics itself. Chapter 1, the reprinting of Hilary Chute's “Why Sex?” provides a framework to better understand why sex remains such an important area of exploration for comics. In Chapter 2 Patrick S. Lawrence's work on R. Crumb's Bible of Filth works through a perception of obscenity as a feature, not a bug. Andrew Kunka's analysis in Chapter 3 shows that Howard Cruse's work implicitly developed a rhetoric through comics that acted as a way to poke at the Meese Commission's fears about the influences of pornography. In Chapter 4, Jorge Santos analyzes the case of Blazing Combat (Goodwin 2018). In this comic, the Vietnam War is retold through Vietnamese perspectives, which led to boycotts and to the comic's cancellation. Through this case study, Santos argues that counter state histories can be suppressed and flagged as obscene due amongst others to racial dynamics. The three essays in the second part of the volume, “Obscenity in the Gutters and at the Margins” shed light on how marginalized communities and individuals have been and are still targeted by the application of unequal censorship initiatives in the field of comics. In Chapter 5, Richard Price demonstrates that there is a resurgence of battles over graphic storytelling related to the Republican Party's politics. Cathy Thomas analyzes the work of C. Spike Trotman in Chapter 6 and sheds light on the interior life of bigger-sized Black people through frameworks of Black feminist and womanist thought. In Chapter 7, Jarred Wiehe highlights the tension in the representations of queer content in The Walking Dead. The analysis of the prison arc illustrates the creation of heteronormative spaces where heterosexuality is for the panels, queer desire between men lurks in the gutter and lesbian desire is an assault “on preapocalyptic fantasies of heteronormative conjugal intimacy” (24). The third and final part, “Theorizing the Obscene, Seeing Obscenity,” is a selection of four essays that open to a reflection on the theoretical possibilities the focus on comics and obscenity may bring. The analysis of mainstream and alternative comics highlights the importance of the study of the medium within the larger field of culture. In Chapter 8, Jordan Carroll analyzes Chales Burns' Black Hole (1995) and proposes a nonessentialist notion of obscenity. In Chapter 9, Jennifer Caplan analyzes X-Men: Magneto Testament's (2009) treatment of the Holocaust in order to reflect on how and why certain kinds of violence are considered obscene and the ways comics creators work through these concerns. The reading of the Dark Phoenix Saga of Marvel's X-Men (1980) by Anthony Michael D'Agostino in Chapter 10 shows that while the hero's power embodies hetero-reproductive acts, they also renegotiate and re-express kink. The eleventh and last chapter is a reading of Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (2017) by Lee Konstantinou. Konstantinou asks how Ferris's graphic novel transforms the aesthetic category of obscenity for the 21st century, a post-normative age that may have lost the ability to think or feel obscenity. This is a remarkable volume, drawing its strength from the binding threads connecting the essays, one of which is the acknowledgement of the polysemy of the operative terms of this collection (obscenity, censorship, transgression) combined with attempts to renegotiate their position in the legal, social and cultural discourses through different lenses. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Junior A. Tremblay (Thu,) studied this question.