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Tough Love Tuesday Breaking News: Insufficient Censorship
We interupt our regularly scheduled nitpicking about proper grammar and usage to bring you this breaking story:
The reason behind All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder’s recall revealed! The censor bars didn’t print properly a whole bunch of times! Cusswords are visible! Look out! Don’t click through if you don’t want to see Batgirl being super-sassy:
Thanks to an anonymous tipster for the fast camera action! One has to wonder why they’d bother typing out the offending words in the first place, as it runs the risk of exactly this sort of thing happening with no apparent benefit.
This reminds me of an issue of Milestone’s My Name is Holocaust; that had a similar problem. Milestone used “squiggles” to represent profanity, and usually the squiggle was clearly a substitute, not an obfuscation of the word in question. But sometimes it would be a “squiggle” over the word, which is fine until someone forgets to squiggle up several pages of a book, and it goes out unmolested.
Still, you can’t really blame the editors in this case. Had the censor bars been printed properly and actually censored Batgirl’s pottymouth, as they did in ASBAR #6, this wouldn’t be an issue. You win this round, editors! But we’re watching you.
So it looks like this is going to be a thematic sequel to the epic Black Canary “Love Chunks” issue. I can’t wait!
[…] Funnybook Babylon - Archives - Tough Love Tuesday Breaking News: Insufficient Censorship The reason behind All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder’s recall revealed! The censor bars didn’t print properly a whole bunch of times! Cusswords are visible! Look out! Don’t click through if you don’t want to see Batgirl being super-sassy: […]
[…] the goddamn Batman 9 09 2008 Funnybook Babylon and a special Lying In The Gutters at Comic Book Resources are reporting that recent issues of […]
[…] of a book customers have been anticipating for months? Apparently there was a printing problem, as Funnybook Babylon points out: The reason behind All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder’s recall revealed! The censor bars […]
What really surprises me, is that the letterers ACTUALLY type out the words!!?!! And then apply a black box on top of it???! (must be an overprint problem on why this happened)
That’s like Jim Lee drawing a naked Bruce Wayne and Scott Williams inks on the actual Batman outfit…!
Wait someone get Jim on the phone….
Someone who knows about this stuff needs to explain. Completely bizarre.
[…] of Frank Miller, Jim Lee and Scott Williams’ All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder #10. Chris Eckert has reproduced panels from an advance copy of the issue in question, which demonstrate the problem: […]
Zom,
It’s most likely that the letterer directly copied and pasted the text from Frank Miller’s script, which is standard-op for letterers, and then added the black bars. And a printing error is a printing error.
This one’s just funnier than most.
-J
OK folks. How many comics do you own where one color bleeds through another? You’d think a comic company that’s been in business for oh, say…DECADES might have been prepared for this. This is what they get for kissing the ass of guys like Miller who is a what…popular comic book writer?? Gimme a break. That’s like winning a beauty contest at a leper colony.
Sure, that’s a legitimate comparison…if winning a beauty contest at a leper colony gave you a license to print money. And only a halfwit without a TV doesn’t know Miller is more than a “popular comic book writer” at this point.
[…] teve um recall por que a Batgirl é uma desbocada da porra. Se liga no que ela disse: "Sell your poison somewhere else. This arcade belongs to the Fucking Batgirl." A polícia moral deve fazer a festa […]
[…] Funnybook Babylon has the scoop on an ASBARBW #10’s recall, which was caused by a botched attempt to censor Miller’s salty dialogue. The cuss words were to be printed with black bars to obscure the profanity (which maybe shouldn’t have been printed at all if they didn’t want folks to read it?) but as can be seen in the example below (also from the folks at Funnybook Babylon), you can still make out the swears. Check out their original article for more examples of the offending language, and repeated references (within 2 consecutive panels?!) to Batgirl as a “sweet piece,” and “jailbait.” Ladies and gentlemen, let’s have a round of applause for Frank Miller, keeping dialogue fresh and classy as a waft of FeBreeeeeze in your pee-hole. […]
Dude. Give it a rest. She’s the FUCKING BATGIRL.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA.
My admiration for some of the work Frank Miller has done is 2nd to none, but it seems like with All Star Batman and Robin… he’s taking things that he would normally do in three or four pages and extending it out into entire issues. The whole “Talk to Green Latern While Painted Yellow” thing seemed to go on and on and on….. And I get that goring peole’s sacred cows can be a kick, especially when the industry get bogged down in giant crossover events and fake character deaths. But Miller seems to just be “screw the reader’s expectations” porn at this point.
Even so, I have to be honest and say I haven’t missed an issue yet. Hell, maybe he’s onto something. I just wish I was enjoying it more.
[…] Funnybook Babylon · Breaking News: Insufficient Censorship The reason behind All-Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder’s recall revealed! The censor bars didn’t print properly a whole bunch of times! Cusswords are visible! Look out! Don’t click through if you don’t want to see Batgirl being super-sassy: […]
I know this makes me sound prudish, but the use of the word ‘cunt’ when referring to a young girl just seems a little unnecessary. I’m not offended or anything, but I don’t know if any real criminal would immediately jump to using that particular pejorative. ‘Bitch’, maybe. But ‘cunt’ just feels like boundary pushing for its own sake.
Cunt would have sounded perfectly fine if the criminal was British or Australian but since it came from a yank it was really weird. I guess the guy was just really trashy.
To answer your question as to why they’d bother typing the words out with no apparent benefit: there actually is one. The edges of the words extend just beyond the borders of the censorship bar, giving readers a hint as to what the word is, not unlike audio being bleeped out partially in television.
The Adventures of the Goddamn Batman and the Fucking Batgirl. I love it! Keep up the good work Franky Boy, dunno where else I get so many laughs!
[…] DC Comic asking all retailers to return copies of the gaffetastic black bar pottymouthed Batman. Courtesy Funnybook Babylon. Of course, the book is now worth a small fortune on […]
so the fact that the gang members were all black and the crowd all white goes unnoticed…also “the fucking Batgirl” means “the Batgirl is fucking.”
And people are surprised that there was a mix up with the ink?
[…] FBB as (well, at least I)’ve been glued to the stats watching a bunch of cellphone shots of a funnybook using dirty words become, like, our most popular post ever. Back to that in a […]
And only a halfwit without a TV doesn’t know Miller is more than a “popular comic book writer” at this point.
I know who Frank Miller is. I bought his first job at Marvel off the rack a long long time ago.
What’s his resume outside of comics? Screenwriter on a couple of decent movies. Co-director of Sin City. Director of an as yet to be released movie. Hmmmm… a popular comic writer got a job in a fan geek driven industry as a screen writer and a director doing fan geek driven projects. How many non-comic readers have ever heard of him? Few? None? He’s not doing Batman because the fans are clamouring for the screenwriter of Robocop 2. He’s doing Batman because he did “Dark Knight”.
[…] is about the All-Star Batman thingaling. I guess what he’s meaning by “authentic street lingo” is curse words, but I […]
[…] Everyone and their brother have been talking about All-Star Batman #10’s printing snaffu. But something I thought was odd that no one has really said yet (that I’m aware of. Edit actually they touch on it a little here): I don’t even think saliors swear as much as these people. It’s almost comical how much they’re swearing. I’ll censor it but here’s one quote: F@$% you twice, D#&*w@%!. You let a f%^&ing little piece of jailbait @$% steal your wheels… […]
They keep the cusswords in there so that they can do the “UNCENSORED SPECIAL EDITION” three years later.
They keep the cusswords in there so that they can do the “UNCENSORED SPECIAL EDITION” three years later.
They have never done this with a Batman comic ever.