The fate of Comix Classix: Underground Comics, an app co-produced by Toura, an app platform often used by museums for touring exhibitions and Comic Art and Exhibitions, provides an interesting look at the way in which the various digital platforms deal with controversial content. The Comix Classix app was submitted to Apple in time to get it approved for release at Comic-Con, and in fact the iPad version of the app was approved albeit with numerous disclaimers and warnings about intense sexual content, drug use, and nudity. But the iPhone version of the same app was rejected due to “excessively objectionable or crude content.” After the removal of 16 specific images that were deemed objectionable, the iPhone app was approved on Saturday, July 23rd while Comic-Con was still in session.

In an interview with Michael Dooley on the imprint Website, app creator Kim Munson explained: “I don't think that Apple actually wanted to censor us. They did, after all, approve the iPad version with no changes, just warnings. It's a shame that the whole irrational attitude people have about depictions of sex in the USA can even make a forward-thinking company like Apple nervous.”

Nudity did appear to be the prime criteria in the censoring of images, which ran the gamut from the gritty hardcore panels of S. Clay Wilson to Will Elder’s cover to Snarf #10 from 1987, a rather poignant “end of an era” tip-of the hat to Theodore Gericault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa, an image that could probably get by in a “PG-13” movie.

Munson reported that there were no problems with getting the Comix Classix app approved for the android market.