Handley Reaction.
I just gave $100 to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
It’s what I can do. I’ve been saving for a new laptop; I had the cash. The laptop can wait another month.
The CBLDF has a store. You can buy über-cool stuff, and it goes to support a good cause. Me, I gave them the money straight up — no strings, no incentives — but that’s how I roll. I won’t fault you for buying a signed copy of Bone or The Joker or Mouse Guard or Planetary or Sandman or the Walking Dead. Because the creators who signed & donated those works (Jeff Smith, Brain Azzarello & Lee Bermejo, David Petersen, Warren Ellis, Neil Gaiman, and all three creators of the Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard & Cliff Rathburn) along with notables like Terry Moore, Brian Bendis, Brian K. Vaughn, J.G. Jones, Frank Miller, and Brian Azzarello — and many others — support the CBLDF and see the obvious merit in giving fans the swag they want while also raising money for the cause.
When the time comes, when a zealous and/or misguided local prosecutor comes gunning for your stash, or leans on your local retailer-of-choice looking for a quick “crusader of family values” headline right before an election, it might be too late — I’m sure they’ll be happy to take your money then, but there is work to do now.
Please Give.
As to the specifics of the Handley Case: My Thoughts on Porn Comics are a matter of public record, and have been for four months. None of the specifics (or I should say ‘generalities’ as no specifics have actually been publicized) of the case as revealed to date have changed my opinion since that post.
There’s also this, from my post of 16 Dec 2008, Responses to Tom & Dave
Why Is It That People Still Don’t Seem To Get The CBLDF?This is related, I fear, to the public hatred of the ACLU.
The American Civil Liberties Union is dedicated to one-and-a-half things: The Defense of Your Rights, that is to say (there’s the one and here’s the half) the individual rights guaranteed to you by the constitution.
Occasionally, they have adopted an unpopular position because the need to defend some idiot for being an idiot is also necessary to protect your rights. For this they are branded Evil, a boil upon the ass of the earth, a pestilence not to be endured.
These same idiots that condemn the ACLU are in fact those best served by its efforts. The irony of this is not lost on the brave activists who ceaselessly work for your individual rights; ACLU employees are saints. If you’re a dittohead I beg of you to turn off the radio for three weeks and seriously look at your values. I mean, think. It’s tough, I know, and so much easier to condemn others and echo the thoughts of those who speak loudly about stuff they either don’t understand or are purposely misleading you about. But the ACLU is a right-wing, libertarian, extremist organization — about as far from liberal as one can get: their focus is on individual rights over that of the government. If you hate the government, what’s the hassle? I can’t imagine why other “right”-thinking persons and organizations don’t support the ACLU. (I can only suppose it’s due to alien mind control)
“The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund was founded in 1986 as a 501 (c) 3 non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of First Amendment rights for members of the comics community.”
That is to say: Your. Constitutionally Guaranteed. Rights. Yours, you own them, folks are trying to take them away but the CBLDF is jumping on grenades right and left to keep you reading comics without state interference you ungrateful chav.
To answer Tom’s question, people don’t know what their rights are to begin with, and are willing to give them away for tuppence because they’re idjits. That, and the CBLDF needs to add a “what we do” tab to their homepage.
I don’t know if I missed it the first time, but you guys could still make it more obvious on your home page.
