Found via MangaBlog, Matt Thorn shares his correspondence between Christopher Handley’s counsel, and Handley’s mother. Heartbreaking.
Interesting clue as to which titles lead to the charges against Handley… the counsel had asked Matt Thorn if they could get in touch with ero-mangaka Henmaru Machino. If you are not familiar with his work, they’re usually quite insane, catering to the most esoteric of fetishes and grotesque imagery in all of manga. But they’re also humorously absurd, astoundingly creative, and bordering on the surreal. Machino is the Magritte of the ero manga world.
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Adult industry website AVN (warning: nude pictures of real people… eww) has some coverage of the Handley case, which makes it seem even more likely that Yaoi titles were involved; the andronynous look typical of men in those manga posed most difficulty for the defense.
See, this is why this issue was never about why we should defend perverts, or sexism, or lolicon, as some people have made it out to be. This is about broadly-worded, unconstitutional, fear-mongering, thought crime laws that place hundreds of thousands (millions?) of otherwise law-abiding citizens in legal jeopardy and abridges the rights of both men and women.
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It seems Dark Horse is also raising prices on manga, or at least on Berserk (which means it’s possible the decision came from DMP, I suppose). The 31st volume of the bloody actioner is being solicited at $14.95, incidentally reaching parity with some of our pr0n manga re-releases. Now our prices are in line with industry! You can’t complain anymore, hah!
I seem to recall the debut volume of Berserk had a higher price tag than the rest, so maybe you can think of this as the expiration of a coupon, rather than a price hike. (Hat tip: the watchful eyes of AnimeOnDVD forum)
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Stupid, stupid, stupid… We inadvertantly left out the dialogue on one page in Comic AG issue 105 (we use scripts to batch process all the pages for print, so we didn’t catch this error.) Bunch of “professionals” we are. Anyway, here’s the trade paperback version of the page.
The Scarlet Desire trade paperback, btw, is currently being printed in Taiwan.
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“which makes it seem even more likely that Yaoi titles were involved”
Eh, I don’t see any new info on that. AVN is only citing the MTV blog post that came out in November. As far as I can tell from reading everything I can find, the final charges stem from just the one unidentified item with the heterosex bestiality, whatever it was. So get your underage-girl animal-porn from a US retailer.
We’re all still in legal jeopardy: as written, “visual representations of the sexual abuse of children” include nudity (specifically, “the lascivious display of the genitals or pubic area”), masturbation, or any sex act involving a minor (even if it’s consensual sex between 17-year-olds); the only allowable defense is that the images in question are not obscene, and you have to go through a jury trial to demonstrate that…
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All of the correspondence details have been removed from Thorn’s post now.
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It’s still in Google’s cache.
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My first reaction to the Machino thing was that they would use him as an example of someone whose explicit manga was artistic, not obscene. He was in some Superflat exhibits, right? If Machino’s manga itself is what actually got him arrested, that would be even more terrifying.
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Huh! The last mess up was Scarlet Desires also.
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Ah I think I read Scarlet Desire a while ago, nice snippet! I am curious about how this manga artist could help Handley though.
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