List of Illustrations
Foreword. Your Obscene Is Not Mine: A Defense of the Art of Comics (Frederick Luis Aldama)
Introduction. “A Cultural Slaughter of the Innocents” (Patrick S. Lawrence and Jorge J. Santos Jr.)
Timeline of Significant Events
Part One. Out of the Gutters: Comics’ History of Obscenity
- 1. Why Sex? (Hillary Chute)
- 2. “Wise Up, Old Hags! Th’ Weak One Is a Valuable Possession to Us”: R. Crumb’s Bible of Filth and Obscenity as Artificial Scarcity (Patrick S. Lawrence)
- 3. Howard Cruse’s War on the War on Obscenity (Andrew J. Kunka)
- 4. Obscene Histories: Indexing the Racial Phantasms of Blazing Combat (Jorge J. Santos Jr.)
Part Two. Obscenity in the Gutters and at the Margins
- 5. Graphic Storytelling, Book Challengers, and Obscenity (Richard S. Price)
- 6. Big-Boned Sapphic Smut: The Reading Pleasure of Comics by and about Black Women (Cathy Thomas)
- 7. Robert Kirkman’s Gays in the Gutter: Anti-Queer Censorship, Obscenity, and The Walking Dead (Jarred Wiehe)
Part Three. Theorizing the Obscene, Seeing Obscenity
- 8. Planet Xeno: Obscenity as Erotic Alienation in Charles Burns (Jordan Carroll)
- 9. Seen, Unseen, and Obscene: Historical Violence in Comic Books (Jennifer Caplan)
- 10. Obscene Empathy: Kink and the Comics Code Authority in X-Men’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” (Anthony D’Agostino)
- 11. Boobs Monsters: Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Horror Comics, and the Fate of Disciplinary Normalization in the Twenty-First Century (Lee Konstantinou)
Afterword. A Conversation about Community with MariNaomi (Jorge J. Santos Jr.)
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index

Out of the Gutters

Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics