SpiderBaby Archives: WaP!, Part 13
WaP!: “So-Called Adult Comic Books”
The Forgotten Activist Prozine vs Canada Campaign for Censoring Comics: Part 13
Before we leave the month of April behind, there’s one more anniversary I have to commemmorate that involves comics and WaP!—though it’s not as well-known as Superman‘s anniversary, nor should it be.
Stepping back just one issue further, WaP! #3 featured the most detailed overview of Ontario‘s abbreviated campaign against adult comics in 1988, an excellent article authored by vet comics retailer/creator/television industry pro Mark Askwith. Mark was writing about, and reacting to, an April 1988 CBC news program that attacked comicbooks.
Mark and I go way back, having met in the early 1980s when Mark was still managing Toronto‘s Silver Snail comics shop.
Mark also went on to write for comics and work in television for TVOntario, where he produced and conducted countless interviews for Prisoners of Gravity (which I occasionally appeared on, and still use in my Center for Cartoon Studies classroom today!), and was one of the founding producers of Canada‘s sf channel SPACE.
Mark arguably remains best known in comics circles for having co-scripted The Prisoner: Shattered Visage comics series (with Dean Motter, DC Comics, 4 issues now in collected trade paperback, 1988-89), among others.
Personally, I’m forever in Mark‘s debt—because he’s the man who suggested the title for what became Taboo—which Mark also co-created memorable comics work for (“Sharks” in Taboo 2 and “Davey’s Dream” in Taboo 4, both created with his ink-slinging Wordsmith and Silencers partner-in-crime R.G. Rick Taylor); he kindly granted permission for the reprint of his revealing WaP! #3 article today.
but held off on doing anything more than mention Mark‘s article until we had a chance to chat, and my deepest thanks to Mark for granting permission to include his complete essay here today.
Give the Monitor installment a viewing, and read on…
_____
Yummy Fur #5 cover, “in the bullseye” via the Monitor program and other events, cover art ©1988, 2013 Chester Brown. Yummy Fur began as a self-published minicomic that Chester mailed to John Totleben and I in 1983; the series was subsequently published by Vortex (1986-1991) and Drawn and Quarterly (1991-1994).
_______
As previously noted (and shared, but here we go again, for the sake of completion in the proper context), WaP! accompanied Mark‘s article with a guide to interacting with news media in an environment that was ripe with increasingly sensationalistic reporting on a procession of comics shop busts. This was something no other publication was discussing, much less offering “how to/how not to” tips for dealing with increasing unexpected media scrutiny:
Next: WaP! #5, at last…
To be continued!
________
Repeating: This material has never been seen online before, anywhere.
I’ll continue sharing it, as long as the following groundrules are honored.
This serialized essay is ©2013 Stephen R. Bissette. The individual archival images are ©1988 their respective authors and creators.
Note: I have not granted permission for these posts to be shared at Goodreads.com or any other thieving sites that cull blog content from non-participating creators; if this post is appearing anywhere but at the genuine Myrant blog/site (http://srbissette.com), it is stolen and should be immediately shut down and reported.
_________
Some ground rules: Please respect these rules, and please report to me (via comments thread or email — msbissette@yahoo.com) any breaking of these rules.
If all goes well, I’ll do more of this at Myrant; if the virtual archives are robbed, so to speak, this will be the last and only time I get into these kinds of archival materials at Myrant.
Please:
1. Post links to the relevant Myrant posts; please do NOT lift the graphics to place them on your own blog, journal or website.
2. Please do NOT lift these posts, and my text, verbatim and place them on your blog, journal, flicker pages or whatever.
3. Please note all copyright notices at the end of each post, and respect them. I do not own this copyright material, nor do I claim to; I am sharing it here (with correct copyright ownership noted) to share this material with fans, scholars and researchers.
4. If there are any problems, I’ll just tear this all down and abandon the project.
PS: I have removed subscription info from all images/text; the WaP! address is no longer active, subscriptions/copies are obviously no longer available (and no, I don’t know where/how you can find copies, sorry).
Let’s see where this goes. Thanks!
I once had what was supposed to be an article (written by a student reporter who was one of our subscribers) listing our spring reading suggestions come out radically edited with the the headline “NAUGHTY COMICS THRIVE IN DOWNTOWN ATHENS” plastered across the top of the page right above a smiling picture of me! It seems that Joel wrote a much too long article with everything we had talked about that day, and his editor decided to focus in on a digression about the then-current porn comics boom (this was 1991). He was mortified when he came slinking in that day, and we were, as you might imagine, concerned, but there were no consequences, other than Peter Bagge’s later fictionalized retelling of the story as a one-pager on the back of HATE #10.