ComicCon-ing: Being on a Panel

This week we will be posting about our adventures at Wizard World New Orleans.
I’ve always been the attendee at the ComicCons we have attended in the past. We have attended panels and met celebrity guests and artists. However, for Wizard World New Orleans, I was actually having people look at me.
A coworker of mine and the guys from the LongBox presented a panel on censorship in comics. We discussed the history of comic censorship including the Comics Code.  We talked about present day books that have been challenged. For my part, I discussed The Killing Joke and Bone. The Killing Joke challenge makes sense.  It’s depicts graphic violence and shows a woman being violated.  Bone‘s challenge makes a lot less sense.  There is some gambling and one character smokes, but there is nothing truly objectionable. The panel all agreed determining something age-appropriateness is not necessarily censorship.  Banning books altogether is.
The audience was fantastic.  In fact, I had attended a few panels earlier in the con and saw a lot of those people at our panel.  They had asked great questions in the other panel, so I got a little nervous. Of the panelists, I’m the newcomer to comics and there were quite a few people in the audience who had way more extensive knowledge of comics than I do. Feedback was all positive, but that was only from my friends.

This experience makes want to do more panels in the future.  In fact, I’m planning on starting a panel on using comics in education.  Hopefully, we will get it done in time for next year’s Wizard World New Orleans.
If you want to know more about comics and censorship, please go to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund History of Censorship page.