And you’re going, “well actually, if you read the book, there is no porn in this and it’s not what you think it is and if you read it, you would learn and you would be challenged and you would go to new places and I hope that maybe you’ll read a bunch of prose and grow up a bit. Partly, I think people automatically equate pictures with things for children and partly you get the kind of nonsense that happened this week, when a student at Duke University declined publicly and noisily to read Fun Home by Alison Bechdal - and he said he probably would have been able to read it if it was a novel - but the pornographic drawings would incite lust in his heart and thus he would be sent to hell. But it’s really easy to upset them with comics and graphic novels because - just because there are pictures.

It’s slightly easier to upset people with movies. It’s hard to upset people with just prose these days because you actually have to read it and you have to think about it and you have to understand it.

Why do you think people disapprove of this genre in particular?īecause they have pictures and because pictures are easy to ban pictures can be devoid of context. I think that sometimes the whole available-online-thing is a bit weird in that it can absolutely limit people’s access to books in a way that simply taking it off a shelf cannot.Ĭomic books and graphic novels often face the threat of being banned or removed from libraries. I think that having physical access to a book, or at least to the content of the book, is huge and important. And I think libraries and schools have a quality of serendipity - it’s the fact that something can look interesting from the cover, you can pick it up, you can hold it. Well, for a start, a lot of people are not online. Why do you think it’s important for controversial books to be physically present in libraries and schools and not just available online?

The graveyard book series