Comic Book Legal Defense Fund:
An Interview with Chris Oarr

by Karon Flage ( karon@sequentialtart.com)

This issue, Sequential Tart would like to draw attention to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. I was able to steal Chris Oarr, Executive Director of the CBLDF away for a few moments to do an interview during the Small Press Expo versus Diamond Distributors softball game. (Diamond lost again this year.) As I told Chris that I would not take up his time with questions that could be answered on CBLDF's website, be sure and visit it after reading the interview.

As I write this introduction, Congress has passed, and the President has signed, the Communications Decency Act II. Our audience is the Internet. Any law that mandates censorship on the net impacts Sequential Tart. Our primary topic is comic books. Any act of censorship toward comics impacts us. Unfortunately, with the current climate towards Free Speech in the US today, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund is a necessity and deserves your support. In other words, read the interview, follow the link to the Fund's website, and buy one of those nifty Frank Miller fight censorship t-shirts.

Sequential Tart: When you are at comic book conventions, do you find that people are still unaware of the efforts of the CBLDF or do you feel like you are preaching to the choir?

Chris Oarr: Particularly at the bigger shows I still talk to people that are befuddled about our purpose so I don't feel like everyone in comics is aware of us. Unfortunately, a small percentage grasps what we do but still remain befuddled as to why we need to do it. It's always nice to see people that I only get to talk to at cons and some of them have become fixtures. It's also important to just keep us in the public eye. Plus, only a small portion of the comic reading public goes to cons. I am always talking to someone who is at their first con and this is the first time they really became aware of what the Defense Fund does.

ST: Are there any efforts to become known beyond the comics community? Neil Gaiman is one of the guests of honor at next years Horror Con and I think there is a great deal of crossover between the horror and comics communities because I am one of those cross over people.

Oarr: Oh definitely. While I am here at SPX, other board members are at Mad Media 5, a science fiction convention. We will also be at the New Jersey Bookfair and Tropicon. The CBLDF has resonance with anyone who reads. As someone who went to my share of Sci-fi conventions in my childhood, I recognize the crossover between the comics, horror, sci-fi and fantasy groups. We don't have to tell those groups the importance of preventing censorship as they see it in their own fields all too often. People will come by the booth at a Sci-fi convention and drop a fifty in our bucket not because they read comics but because they support the First Amendment.

Conventions, comic or otherwise, are a very important part of our outreach program. We want to have a broad net and cover as much of the con circuit as we can. Basically, we want to be where the weird stuff is.

ST: Are there any current cases we should be aware of?

Oarr: Some of the most recent events we have been following involve censorship and on-line comics. I can't go into any details because our involvement is not official.

ST: That's interesting that on-line comics are now being looked at by the CBLDF. It looks like Son of CDA (Communications Decency Act) is going to get out of Congress. The House Commerce Committee passed it on Friday.

Oarr: Yes, and that cuts to the core of new art. Essentially we are an arts support group the believes in the First Amendment.

ST: I find that as a computer professional and a comic book reader I run across censorship issues on a daily basis.

Oarr: Very true and I can't think of any technological groups that are in favor of censorship.

ST: How important is the website for publicity?

Oarr: It's very useful. In August, we had 102,000 hits (including banner ad click-throughs), the months before that it was 70,000, 62,000, and 43,000 so we are building our audience on the web. We have a great webmaster and my hat's off to him. Even though we have a limited staff we are committed to adding new content. Our newsletter is going quarterly and we want to use the website as another standard line of communication. Two new projects going up are an interactive time-line on comics and an on-line research bibliography that includes legal source sites. I have asked the at-comics list to do a beta test on it.

ST: Can you give me a date when the bibliography will go online?

Oarr: We hope to have it on the site within the next month.

ST: I have heard that Dave Sim and Neil Gaiman are two of the CBLDF's biggest money-raisers. Does it strike anyone as odd that two non-Americans have donated so much time and effort to the fund?

Oarr: Well, both of them have a large stake in the American market. But more importantly they both value comics as an art form and they are both willing to fight for freedom of expression. Neil Gaiman has mentioned many times that in England there is no guarantee of free speech. And Dave Sim has often seen comics stopped at the border to Canada. It's funny; most comics are printed in Canada now. So they get shipped to the US and then get stopped going back into Canada.

ST: It has been pointed out on many occasions by the CBLDF that comics should be accorded the same constitutional rights as literature, film, or any other form of expression. Are we any closer to achieving that end?

Oarr: Not really, although the biggest cases in the news recently have been about photography books.

ST: Once again a visual rather than just the written word.

Oarr: It's the immediacy of photos or art that often equals vulnerability. Comics don't look like they used to and that disturbs some people. Comics are still regarded as disposable juvenilia.

Photography by Karon Flage

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