Cartoons and Censorship: Concerning Current Challenges to Comics

In the current trend of censoring American libraries, comics make up an increasingly large portion of the challenged material. As someone invested in comics as an art form, I want to ask: What comics are being removed from library shelves and why?

For those who aren’t aware of how quickly this issue has grown in magnitude: Since the American Library Association started tracking censorship in the United States in 1990, the three years with the most banned books have been 2022, 2023, and 2024. At the time of writing this, the equivalent statistics for 2025 have not yet been released, but there is no sign that this campaign is stopping. Between 2015 and 2020 there was an average of 274 titles being challenged per year; in 2021 through 2024 that number increased dramatically to 6,403.

One aspect of this trend that merits closer investigation is the growing proportion of comics among these banned books. From 2021 through 2023 (including two of the three years where the most censorship has occurred) the honorable spot of most banned book in the country went to Maia Kobabe’s 2019 graphic memoir Gender Queer. It was barely displaced from that number one placement in 2024 with a margin of one challenge by a prose queer memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue (I’m starting to detect a pattern here). Additionally, mangakas Yūsei Matsui and Atsushi Ohkubo—of Assassination Classroom and Soul Eater fame respectively—both rank among the most challenged authors of any genre in the country. If we were to count separate volumes in their series as their own books (which traditional statistics do not) they would be the two most banned authors in America in 2024 and 2025. Controversy surrounding comics is nothing new—they have been expurgated by moral panics for nearly as long as they have existed. But that doesn’t entirely explain their place in this sudden new wave of bans.

Traditionally, comics can attribute their controversies to a few factors. One is the common misconception of them being primarily for children and the subsequent expectation that all comics be child appropriate. Appeals to protect the innocence of children are often used as justification for censorship, but it’s important to note that 55 percent of the bans in 2024 were in public libraries, and only 38 percent in schools. There’s also the possibility that this increased targeting of comics might have something to do with their visual form. Especially in a visual culture and literacy crisis, images are more immediately and widely accessible than prose. That makes them not only dangerous to those who want to control information, but also vulnerable to moral panics and cherry picking. Since comics are the art of juxtaposing images, it’s not particularly difficult to manufacture a case of obscenity by removing a panel from the context that gives it meaning and showing it at a board meeting or other assembly. A powerful enough image can convince incurious people to condemn without further investigation or justification. But, of course, the primary reason books are suppressed is almost always in opposition to their content. In this case, modern censorship of both prose and comics is explicitly discriminatory, intended to remove certain perspectives that do not align with extreme conservatism. The motivation becomes clear considering how disproportionately authors targeted by these attacks are queer, POC, or both.

That answers why an inoffensive YA memoir like Gender Queer has been so inflammatory. Not only does it commit the transgression of being a queer memoir, but it has the audacity to do so visually in an educational tone accessible to a child audience, containing a single panel that can be decontextualized and cited as evidence of its alleged inappropriateness. Similarly, the popularity of banning manga can be attributed to a combination of xenophobia, it being popular with kids, and the relative ease of finding a rhetorically useful violent or sexual image in shonen manga compared to other genres. While I’ve focused on the most popular targets for current comics censorship as examples, many of the others that frequently appear on recent ban lists (examples include This One Summer, Flamer, Heart Stopper, Fairy Tale, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me, and The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel) conform to these patterns. It’s important to note that while these statistics are appalling, these decisions can be resisted and reversed at every level they are made. Despite how disheartening this situation is, there is always more that can be done to improve it.

Back Matter

Source: https://www.ala.org/news/state-americas-libraries-report-2025

Fact: The number of books challenged in any given year, source of most statistics cited in the blog post

Source:https://cbldf.org/resources/history-of-comics-censorship/

Fact: A general history of comics censorship

Source: https://bookriot.com/trends-in-comic-censorship-2025/

Fact: Current statistics and trends in comics censorship

Source: https://pen.org/report/the-normalization-of-book-banning/

Fact: Statistics on book banning specifically in schools and the discriminatory nature of those bans

Source:https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/2024-2025-literacy-statistics

Fact: Literacy rates in the U.S.

Source:https://thenib.com/i-made-the-most-banned-book-in-america/