If you’re following us on Facebook (and you really, really should be–just search for “Alt Press”), then you’ve glimpsed the inter-cultural amazingness currently displayed on Level 2 at the Main Library.
We’re talking about zines from Japan!
In a first-ever international outreach experiment, we shipped off some of our precious zine collection (via good old snail mail) to Kanda University of International Studies, about an hour east of Tokyo, Japan.
In honor of Banned Book Week (Sep 22-28), I thought it might be interesting to see how far comics have come from the wild west of first half the 20th century to the the terror of the Comic Code Authority in the 50’s which took another 50 years to be abandoned. Shortly thereafter, a non-profit organization was set up by professionals from the comics industry to protect creators’ First Amendment rights, the aptly-named, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. While great strides have been made in comics, as in book publishing, one must be ever-vigilant to protect art from people or vice-versa. Here’s a link to a list from the CBLDF’s website for Banned Book Week last year: http://cbldf.org/2012/09/banned-and-challenged-comics-revealed/
Rather discouraging is the inclusion of Maus being banned from a Pasadena public library and Bone from a school district in Minnesota.
slcplaltpress 