John Jelley of Pymrimid Comics and Games in Sierra Vista, Arizona saw these Talk Back comments on retailer responsibility and sent us his reaction:

'As a manager it IS MY JOB to read comics' by Sara Gray (see 'Sara Gray of Mira Mesa Comic Gallery on Knowing Your Inventory'); 'TAGs aren't censorship' by Michael Tierney (see 'Michael Tierney of the Comic Book Store on Outsider #8'); 'On the subject of retailer's responsibilities, both David and Sara are 100% correct' by Jerry Wall  (see 'Jerry Wall of Atomic Comics on Comic Ratings'); and 'Lots of times parents just come in, grab whatever they see and hand them to their kids without even taking the time to look inside' by David Bigas (see 'David Bigas of Wyldstar on Comic Ratings').

I find the comments on this matter disturbing.  This is a problem that has plagued the publishing industry for generations and any retailer or advisor only has a certain amount of responsibility.  Should libraries be responsible if a 14 year old reads Ulysses or Hamlet and some parent thinks this is inappropriate for their child.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a middle school reading assignment in my school.  No one would ever think to come in to your store and tell you that you cannot sell copies of The Bible or the Quran.  Yet this is what you are doing.  By suggesting that you should not sell certain books to certain people you are censoring what you sell.

This is not to say that you should sell anything to anybody, if that was the case then we all would be in jail.  But the way we have done things in our store is to have parents get involved.  If we deem that a book is to mature for a 13 year child but a parent has allowed their child to read such material a suitable, are we going to tell that customer that his kids cant read these books?  We feel that it is up to the retailers and parents to know what their customers/children are reading.  If young teens want to read Johnny The Homicidal Maniac we recommend that they have their parents come in with them to buy this comic.  That way we can see that the parents are involved in understanding what their children are reading.  This may loose you a few teen customers, but in the long run will save many headaches, as well as have very appreciative parents.

By suggesting that we are 100% responsible for what we sell is ridiculous, some people will always take offense to any form of comic books.  We recently ran in to this problem while donating comic books to a local school library and reading program.  Some of the parents thought that comic books were not appropriate for their children to be reading.  Of course these are the same people who were trying to get the above mention books banned from the same school even including The Bible and the Quran.  There will always be these people who try to place their narrow views upon the masses, and this is not only wrong, but censorship.  We feel that it is a partnership between the retailers, publishers, and parents.

Some history:

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, shortly after its publication, it was banned from the Concord Public Library.  In Mark Twain's lifetime, his books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were excluded from the juvenile sections of the Brooklyn Public library (among other libraries), and banned from the library in Concord, MA, home of Henry Thoreau.  In recent years, some high schools have dropped Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from their reading lists, or have been sued by parents who want the book dropped.  In Tempe, Arizona, a parent's lawsuit that attempted to get the local high school to remove the book from a required reading list went as far as a federal appeals court in 1998.

Ulysses was barred from the United States as obscene for 15 years.  The Bible and the Quran were both removed from numerous libraries.  The Savannah Morning News reported in November 1999 that a teacher at the Windsor Forest High School required seniors to obtain permission slips before they could read Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear.

Ref: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html