Bit of a stir in Vietnam: apparently the kids are reading manga and it is causing their moral centres to disintegrate.
Commenting on the negative effects of these comics on children, one educator in HCM City said mostly teenagers, aged 12 and over, prefer Japanese comics -- which are full of inappropriate pictures and content, compared to books produced domestically. Teens are reading these harmful comics with great concentration.
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"I'm worried sick about my son and his classmates when they read foreign comics. These books are not suitable for teens but they are very attractive to them," said Nguyen Thi Uyen. "I don't want any more comics for my son."
Alright, it's true. Reading Rumiko Takahashi comics has led to my striking up a close personal friendship with a panda and avoiding baths at all costs.
What really bothers me is that the Vietnamese are only just now getting around to channelling xenophobia into a 'ban the comics' campaign. Know when we did this in Britain? 19fucking54, slackers! See this here Children And Young Persons (Harmful Publications) Act of the following year:
1. This Act applies to any book, magazine or other like work which is of a kind likely to fall into the hands of children or young persons and consists wholly or mainly of stories told in pictures (with or without the addition of written matter)
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2. (1) A person who prints, publishes, sells or lets on hire a work to which this Act applies, or has any such work in his possession for the purpose of selling it or letting it on hire, shall be guilty of an offence and liable, on summary conviction, to imprisonment for a term not exceeding four months
Well, you can read the rest of it yourself, in your own time. The law proved to be mostly symbolic: it has been used, for example in the case against Savoy Books over Lord Horror in 1991, but there it turned out to be unnecessary and the publishers were found guilty under the non-comics obscenity laws. It does, however, remain in force to this day.
The secret history of the 1955 Act is written up in Martin Barker's book A Haunt Of Fears. Here's the short version. The 1954 anti-comics Senate hearings in the USA came about after psychologist Fredric Wertham published his book Seduction of the Innocent, which laid the blame for a rising tide of juvenile delinquency at the door of comics featuring sex, murder, and a gay Batman and Robin. Prosecutors worried that children were being corrupted by stories featuring unAmerican material.
In Britain it was almost the exact opposite. Ostensibly the anti-comics campaign here was also a response to sex, violence and uphill-gardening superheroes but in fact what provoked it was something simpler: the comics came from America. A movement on the hard Left was worried that children were being exposed to pro-capitalist propaganda in their reading material, and they were the ones who agitated for a change in the law.
From the standpoint of today, I think we can safely say that they got it wrong. I have read a broad selection of the EC horror comics which were outlawed. I remember several incidences of severed heads, rotting corpses and so on, but no mentions of markets or free trade. On the other hand, there were American comics which extolled the virtues of accumulating capital, which fetishised money and featured a rock-ribbed individualist in conflict with the forces of totalitarianism. British campaigners buried the Crypt Keeper, but they should really have gone after Scrooge McDuck.
(I actually think Scrooge might have been spared because his adventures were written and drawn by Carl Barks. Trying to ban a guy named 'Carl Barks' is probably a little too near the knuckle if you're a member of the Communist Party.)
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