Out of the Gutters - Obscenity, Censorship, and Transgression in American Comics

How comics and graphic novels use obscenity and other taboos to shed light on important issues.

List of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Foreword. Your Obscene Is Not Mine: A Defense of the Art of Comics (Frederick Luis Aldama)
• Introduction. “A Cultural Slaughter of the Innocents” (Patrick S. Lawrence and Jorge J. Santos Jr.)
• Timeline of Significant Events
• Part One. Out of the Gutters: Comics’ History of Obscenity
  • 1. Why Sex? (Hillary Chute)
  • 2. “Wise Up, Old Hags! Th’ Weak One Is a Valuable Possession to Us”: R. Crumb’s Bible of Filth and Obscenity as Artificial Scarcity (Patrick S. Lawrence)
  • 3. Howard Cruse’s War on the War on Obscenity (Andrew J. Kunka)
  • 4. Obscene Histories: Indexing the Racial Phantasms of Blazing Combat (Jorge J. Santos Jr.)
• Part Two. Obscenity in the Gutters and at the Margins
  • 5. Graphic Storytelling, Book Challengers, and Obscenity (Richard S. Price)
  • 6. Big-Boned Sapphic Smut: The Reading Pleasure of Comics by and about Black Women (Cathy Thomas)
  • 7. Robert Kirkman’s Gays in the Gutter: Anti-Queer Censorship, Obscenity, and The Walking Dead (Jarred Wiehe)
• Part Three. Theorizing the Obscene, Seeing Obscenity
  • 8. Planet Xeno: Obscenity as Erotic Alienation in Charles Burns (Jordan Carroll)
  • 9. Seen, Unseen, and Obscene: Historical Violence in Comic Books (Jennifer Caplan)
  • 10. Obscene Empathy: Kink and the Comics Code Authority in X-Men’s “Dark Phoenix Saga” (Anthony D’Agostino)
  • 11. Boobs Monsters: Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Horror Comics, and the Fate of Disciplinary Normalization in the Twenty-First Century (Lee Konstantinou)
• Afterword. A Conversation about Community with MariNaomi (Jorge J. Santos Jr.)
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Index




About the author










Jorge J. Santos, Jr. is an associate professor of Multiethnic Literatures of the United States at the College of the Holy Cross and the author of Graphic Memories of the Civil Rights Movement: Reframing History in Comics.
Patrick S. Lawrence is an associate professor of English at the University of South Carolina Lancaster and the author of Obscene Gestures: Counter-Narratives of Sex and Race in the Twentieth Century.

Product details

• Authors: Jorge J. (EDT)/ Lawrence Santos, Jorge J. Lawrence Santos
• Assisted by: Patrick Lawrence (Editor), Patrick S Lawrence (Editor), Jorge J Santos (Editor), Jorge J. Santos (Editor)
• Publisher: University Of Texas Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.07.2025
• EAN: 9781477331804
• ISBN: 978-1-4773-3180-4
• No. of pages: 304
• Series: World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction Series
• Subjects: Fiction > Comic, cartoon, humour, satire; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies