Comics and the culture of free speech: the case of Neil Gaiman

ABSTRACT

Comics have been especially vulnerable to censorship. A history of repression has been well documented in the scholarship and is part of fan lore and culture – so much so, in fact, that the topic risks becoming calcified. This paper argues for a broader examination of free speech and comics, the better to understand how the creation and circulation of texts shapes the medium. Here, Neil Gaiman serves as a valuable case study, a creator who not only advocates for free speech but whose intellectual formation depended upon it. Attending to the liberalising forces of mid-Twentieth Century, the paper illustrates how the availability of texts was essential to the formation of Gaiman’s distinct comics aesthetic. Moreover, as Gaiman’s case suggests, comics depends on free speech not only to protect creators, but to guarantee access to the materials out of which traditions can be built.

KEYWORDS:

• Free speech
• comics
• Neil Gaiman
• permissive society
• censorship

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The influence of these policies was significant, for Gaiman’s friends and collaborators are similarly indebted to the public library. Thus, Alan Moore (who famously taught Gaiman how to write a comics script) has framed his early life in terms of independence offered and independence taken – taken, that is, in the direction of the public library. Speaking to The Comics Journal, Moore has said that ‘In terms of my inner life, or my intellectual life, I was largely left to my own devices. Which suited me just fine. I knew where the library was’ (qtd. in Parkin 2016, 26). Elsewhere, Gaiman’s friend and co-author of Good Omens, Terry Pratchett, notes of his education in the public library that ‘one book leads on to another and little bits of knowledge hook together like some kind of DNA strand and you’re getting some kind of an education’ (Orr 2008, 12). The irascible Pratchett declared that ‘You are talking to a man who thinks, mostly, that his school days assisted him not at all, but the library did, in spades’ (Chivers 2015). Gaiman’s was not, then, an isolated experience. These three writers alone account for a significant portion of British book sales at the end of the Twentieth Century; ranging across media and forms, their cultural footprint is striking.