Longtime GalleyCat readers may remember the battle between Georgia prosecutors and comics shop owner Gordon Lee, who has stood accused for more than three years of handing obscene material (in the form of a free promotional comic) to a minor. It's a case that the district attorney's office has screwed up over and over again—and, as writer/illustrator Nick Bertozzi, who created the "offending" passages for his graphic novel The Salon, and Comic Book Legal Defense Fund executive director Charles Brownstein explained last Saturday afternoon, the law Lee is accused of breaking is likely unconstitutional. In this ten-minute video, they break the case down to its basics; the PowerPoint slides, I should warn you, contain cartoonish depictions of Pablo Picasso painting in the nude and of a semi-naked female model. (But they aren't onscreen very long.)

The presentation was the centerpiece of a panel discussion on how retail outlets and libraries can deal with challenges to comics based on their content, part of the New York Center for Independent Publishing's all-day SPLAT! "graphic novel symposium." For Brownstein, the controversy surrounding material like Bertozzi's are evidence of the extent to which comics are pushing themselves into the mainstream: "We're doing something right," he said, "if people are struggling to come to grips with the content." St. John's librarian Stacy Creel discussed what it's like to face challenges from parents offended by graphic novels, stressing to the other librarians in the audience the importance of fully knowing their institution's selection policies, and of being able to explain why the stories in graphic novels were relevant to their adolescent readers. Some of the protests, she observed, verged on the ridiculous, like the complaints made against Colleen Doran's A Distant Soil, which draws protests for a scene depicting two women kissing, on the pages to which the binding most commonly flops open. "And that's when I know they haven't really read the book," Creel said, "because that drawing is of two men with long hair."

In the panel immediately following, writer/artist Kim Dietch gave a history lesson on the graphic novel's literary roots, starting with the illustrations to The Pickwick Papers and Vanity Fair, then moving on to Gustave Doré and Lynd Ward and arriving at Jules Feiffer, Harvey Kurtzman, and Will Eisner. This was the lead-in to a discussion of how graphic novels, especially the more sophisticated ones, should be shelved—do you just create a catch-all graphic novels section, or do you blend them in with other fiction or, in the case of a book like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, nonfiction? It's an increasingly important issue because, as Miriam Tilley of the New York Public Library noted, comics are the most rapidly growing sector of acquisition for many libraries today.