BANG-ZOOM! KA-BLOW! "Comics aren't for kids anymore!" is a phrase hundreds upon thousands of comic fans, cartoonists, scholars and publishers are tired of hearing. Yet at the local high school in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, one family was left devastated when one teen checked out Gilbert Hernandez's seminal work, PALOMAR, "thinking it was a manga." Thanks to local news team at KOAT 7 in Albuquerque, NM, you can see just how many bookmarks the mom carefully made in the book, cataloguing the disturbing images and the investigation that is now under way. Because the images are so "disturbing" and "graphic" they could not show you any images, even the 9,209,384 inoffensive panels in the book. So here they are (based on on my memory and some casual flipping through the book): Instructions on staying clean
Actual love between a couple looking forward to their child:
A young girl, for once, taking pride in the fact her body is changing (and not because some guy said something nasty to her):
The HORROR! To be fair, there are some nude nudes in here of people in coitus that shouldn't necessarily be available in a K-12 library (which it wasn't) but the stories Gilbert Hernandez weaves are epic, layered, multi-generational, complicated—just like real life!
This really all raises the question: why go to the local news first? To create a hysteria around ONE book (see: Chicago, Persepolis) despite the hundreds of other books with devastating, often based-on-the-truth subject matter? If anything, the mom is teaching her kiddo some poor conflict resolution skills – don't attempt to resolve one-to-one, go immediately to the media! If Rio Rancho had a truly supportive community wouldn't the teen and mom go to the library and asked to have the book reassessed for the collection? Instead they are wasting time and money on an event that will end up cutting funding to local school libraries, which have already seen decreases in funding back to 2004 including when computers labs began moving to integrated classroom use (according to this 2004 Standards for New Mexico Libraries report, created by the New Mexico Task Force for Student Libraries). What will kids possibly do if they can't read books and comics at a higher reading-level than their grade? Turn to the internet in search of something worse? Nah, not these days.
Caveat: I am not a parent, just a former library technician at a comic book library.