Man in Iowa charged with possession of “obscene” manga

Christopher Handley is a collector in Iowa. He’s been charged with the alleged possession of obscene manga, and faces up to 20 years in prison.

He received a package containing seven manga, which was intercepted by the Postal Inspector and determined to contain obscene content. Authorities seized his collection of over 1,200 manga volumes, hundreds of DVDs, VHS tapes, laser disks, seven computers, and other material (despite only being charged for the manga). The start of the court case is set for February 2, 2009. The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF), a non-profit organization that defends first amendment rights in relation to comics, has lined up to back Handley, as has famous comic/novel author Neil Gaiman.

He was arrested for images in a comic book! Someone found them offensive, and apparently that’s against the law. Honestly, if police looked through my manga collection, I bet they’d find something someone might consider “obscene.” Why the hell should possession of drawings be against any law? This whole thing is completely absurd.

It’s looking like we’ve found the root of the problem; some of the manga in question was yaoi:

“There is explicit sex in yaoi comics,” Handley’s lawyer Eric Chase told MTV. “And the men are drawn in a very androgynous style, which has the effect of making them look really young. There’s a real taboo in Japan about showing pubic hair, so they’re all drawn without it, which also makes them look young. So what concerned the authorities were the depictions of children in explicit sexual situations that they believed to be obscene. But there are no actual children. It was all very crude images from a comic book.”

While I personally don’t care for yaoi, I wouldn’t arrest someone for reading it. Hell, even if there were children in it rather than young-looking adults, I don’t think it should be illegal. They’re just images. It’s the equivalent of a thought crime.