Johanna at Cognitive Dissonance pointed out a new blog, Dead Chicks and Mayhem, founded on the principle that “Comic books have a major influence in our society and they should be subject to the same rules that music and movies are being forced to follow. Content should be clearly labeled and a product meant for one audience shouldn’t be reworked for another.”
I’m ambivalent about content warnings, in part because of concerns about censorship. When a publisher adopts these warnings as a practice, does it have a chilling effect on the stories they tell? Do creators compromise their output in a pre-emptive effort to comply, rather than putting out a book that’s going to have a “contains violent/sexual/whatever content” stamped on the front?
Are they useful? In my experience, very rarely, mostly because they’re inconsistently applied. The movie rating system has always struck me as flexible to the point of meaningless. There seems to be a huge grey zone between the different levels of age-appropriateness. (Not that I go into movies trying to figure out what made a movie PG-13 as opposed to R, though I will if the movie is boring enough.) Studios campaign for more general-audience ratings all the time, mostly for financial reasons and not from an artistic standpoint. Fair enough, but it doesn’t do much to cement the integrity of the rating system.
Some television programs like 24 have traditionally identified every potentially objectionable bit of content right up front. At the same time, you can see something truly ghastly on, say, CSI without any preface. The interesting thing about television is that popularity issues leeway. I’ve seen any number of production types suggest that you can get away with a lot more if your ratings are high. A casual scan of who issues warnings over what kind of content leads me to believe this is true. And how arbitrary is that?
And comics don’t have a great history in terms of consistent application of content warnings. Take the dust-up over the issue of Avengers featuring a sticky Yellowjacket, fresh from “spelunking.” The last-minute panic over that content suggests that no one was really mindful of warning labels during the process, which renders them kind of meaningless. But, as Lyle points out in comments at Dead Chicks and Mayhem,
“I disagree with Greg that a property should always be apropriate to a single audience, I think it’s good to have separate versions of a franchise providing that their differences are clear (i.e., that Marvel makes a good faith attempt to package a Marvel Age Spider-man so that an average consumer could tell the difference between that and Ultimate Spider-Man).”
Or as DC does with its Adventures line, and the implicit “mature content” notion behind Vertigo and Marvel’s Max. Even with those, there’s a huge middle ground of mainstream titles that range from good-natured romps to babies shot on camera.
As David Fiore suggests at Motime Like the Present, challenging subject matter helps young readers mature or at least begin to consider the wider world. My reading material was almost entirely unmonitored as a kid, and whether that had good outcomes or bad, it did help me think critically about larger issues. It also led me to seek out answers from other sources when I’d encounter something challenging or “mature” in a comic book. Would content warnings (and more alert parents) have kept me from having those reading experiences? I wonder.
Oh, and one last note to the people who are anonymously posting comments at Dead Chicks and Mayhem: you seriously undermine your credibility on subjects like intellectual freedom and individual responsibility when you don’t put your name on your opinions. Sack up and sign it already, even if you don’t feel like setting up a Blogger profile.