They hate us!

While the finding of the check for $130 which National presented to Siegel and Shuster might have been a high point of this year's comic history, here's a strong contender for another: the actual audio of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency hearings on comic books.

While you might have expected much outcry over the introduction of a gay character into the traditionalist world of Riverdale, reaction to Archie Comics's Kevin Keller has been overwhelmingly positive. But Archie has heedlessly kept hurtling down the highway, hellbent for tolerance, going further and further until it seemed inevitable they would rouse a bear somewhere: Kevin got his own series and even his own wedding issue, one of those flash forwards in which he marries a doctor who helped him recover from injuries sustained in the Iraq war. Well, let your faith in the bigotry of humanity be restored: a pressure group is threatening a boycott of Toys 'r' Us over carrying the offending comic.

A Fox News report on how sexy, violent comics are corrupting our youth is ruffling some feather today. The piece originally aired on Fox's Washington DC outlet and found reporter Sherri Ly tut tutting over RED HOOD AND THE OUTLAWS #1 and CATWOMAN #1 as if they just came out and were still on sale. JESUS, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN FOR THE LAST FIVE MONTHS?

We've been a bit out of the news for a few days due to crushing deadlines on another project, and while scanning the news for catch-up purposes we noticed that Google was offering comicbook headlines of the past like this ons from May 12, 1955. The story from the Oxnard Press-Courier relates the story of a vigilante group of concerned citizens who have vowed to make sure that comics on the newsstands were carrying the Comics Code seal and that the "comic book situation" provided proper reading for the kids.

We don't know HOW we missed this story when it originally broke as we're such huge fans of The Brick Testament at Stately Beat Manor. Lest you forget, this is one man's crazy 10-year quest to retell the Bible using Legos a gargantuan task of posing and photographing, not to mention compression. When the book came out in November, we were all over that shit, and so, originally, was massive ass market retailer Sam's Club and religious bookstores, who thought that a version of the Bible told in colorful brick would appeal to children.

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE, the Ariel Schrag-edited look at middle school comedy and shame, isn't a G-rated romp through age 13, but given its subject matter, how could it be? Instead it's an awful painful look at the most painful ages of all, told by 17 cartoonists including Schrag, Daniel Clowes, Joe Matt and more. It is potentially a little too rough for the Buckfield Junior-Senior High School Library in Dixfield, ME where one parent objected to the book being available, prompting a review by the school board:

Comics and related cartoons continue to cause problems in the Middle East. Tunisia, the country widely credited with setting off the "Arab Spring" in a relatively peaceful fashion earlier this year, is in an uproar after Marjane Satrapi's animated film was shown last month and immediately set off a huge controversy for a scene which shows God -- which, as you may have realized by now, is forbidden by some branches of Islam. Nessma, the station which ran the film, is being sued for showing it -- and the trial erupted in angry confrontations yesterday:

Only yesterday word that Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine, was planning to run a a special "Sharia issue" guest edited by the prophet Mohammed. "What could possibly go wrong?" we were planning to write.

This iFanboy interview with a comics pirate who recently quit indicated that even among the scanning community, the good old days were awesome. Now, not so much.

Last week legendary cartoonist R. Crumb disappointed Australian fans who were looking forward to a rare public appearance, when he withdrew, The cause was incendiary comments in a Sunday Telegraph piece called Smutty show a comic outrage which branded him a pervert. In a letter to the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Crumb explains himself a length, and to those who have branded him a woman-hating creep, it's mostly to make his wife happy -- she feared for his safety:

While we were linking to the previous Michael Dooley articles, we found another one from Comic-Con, an interview with Kim Munson, whose Comix Classics: Underground Comics app for iPhone, iPad, and Android hard a hard time getting approved. The app is a survey of classic underground comics art with images from S. Clay Wilson, Reed Waller, Denis Kitchen and more. The pictures are quite dirty -- we struggled to find one to post with this piece before settling on Jimmy Durante by Drew Friedman -- but nothing that isn't legal and available in other places. However, Apple, the electronic middleman, has other ideas:

Canadians seem like a peaceful, tolerant folk, but they have a record of seizing a lot of material at the border, including, this week, several copies of the comics anthology BLACK EYE. Editor Ryan Standfest has a complete account in the link. Basically cartoonist Tom Neely was carrying five copies of the book across the border, when the books were seized. Neely writes: