If you’re a First Amendment absolutist, or even a moderate who had a normal childhood, you’ll view with concern the forces of repression arrayed against the lowly comic book.
In 1986 Friendly Frank’s, a comics store in Lansing, Illinois, is busted for selling Weirdo, Bizarre Sex, and other titles. The CBLDF is founded to aid the defense. Eventually the store manager is acquitted.
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Four years after the California Board of Equalization sank its teeth into Mavrides’s shank he’s still struggling to pry himself free. Admire his fortitude: only $1,467.70 is directly at stake, and he could have settled long ago. But he and the CBDLF fear a doleful precedent, and to avoid setting it the CBDLF has poured nearly $70,000 into Mavrides’s defense.
Mavrides came to the BOE’s attention because of the board’s own blunder. He says that while filing his 1990 sales tax returns, “I put down that I made $14,000 in what I believed to be exempt royalties, mostly from comic work, some of it for prose work and out-of-state work.” (He also sold some piecework illustrations for which he paid sales tax.) A few weeks went by, and the BOE sent Mavrides a letter asking him to explain the exempt $94,000. Someone at the board had typed a nine instead of a one.
But Bessent says comics are both literature and a commodity–and as a commodity they’re taxable.
The ACLU’s position is that illustrations (i.e., Nast, Herblock, Doonesbury) enjoy the same freedom-of-speech protections as text. A taxing scheme that burdens the first but not the second makes an unconstitutional distinction based on content. Furthermore, says an ACLU brief, “any regulation which differentiates between text and illustrations creates a false dichotomy.” To suggest how silly this distinction can be, the brief cites Dr. Seuss.
The publishers of California seem to regard Mavrides as too much of a fringe figure to line up alongside, no matter how clearly it’s in their interests that he prevail. Even Newcombe wasn’t sure just what it is he does. “The nature of my work has been political and social commentary,” Mavrides says. “If I have wandered into sex it’s to comment on that. In the world of comics I am somewhat fringe. I have some respect, but I’m not producing SpiderMan or any widely popular characters.”
