Old news I guess, but about Dark Horse Comics cancelling Gor...

**Sorry. This devolved into a ramble**

I just found out about this while reading the old thread on Book Banning Crazies. (Credit to user amorabunda)

Anyway, Dark Horse Comics was due to publish a comic anthology of the first three Gor books. Looks like they're indefinitely postponed.

I don't really care a whit about the Gor books, but reading the posts on message boards discussing why Dark Horse should cancel the comic made me sick. If you don't like the Gor books, good for you. I don't like them either. But to claim that they shouldn't be allowed to be published because they are a form of hate speech?

I guess I was just shocked reading those posts because I always figured comics people were just like book people and would support a publishers right to publish what they choose even if it is controverial or in bad taste.

I hope these people never catch a whiff of Kushiel's Dart!

No, they seem to be completely self-righteous and intolerant, although they also seem to think of themselves as paragons of right thinking. They don’t even seem to read the posts of anyone who disagrees with them.

It’s scary to see the mindset and methods of religious fundamentalists adopted by feminists.

Sorry I missed your 'ramble,' jseger9000. ;-)

Thanks for the reply amorabunda.

One thing I've noticed about book people is that as a general rule, whether their politics are left, right or center they are never for banning anything (or similarly, seeing pressure brought to bear on a publisher over something they might publish).

It is scary to see the fundies methods being adopted by a group I agree with in principle. Don't they know their own past?

Get angry at Dark Horse comics all you want, but not until after you have at least seen the book.

Consumer activism is considerably different than censorship, IMO. Dark Horse made their decision based on simple economics: They deemed that the profits they would make from the Gor books were not worth the cost (profits lost to boycott, lost good-will, etc.)

The artists & writers, or anybody else interested in doing the project, are welcome to find other publishing houses -- there are plenty of publishing houses that would take the Gor materials and happy to work with John Norman (or his estate) on it.

Nobody faced any loss of liberty or punitive consequences from doing this or from refraining from doing it. It's important to remember the real distinctions between the use of state power -- which is inherently coercive -- and nonviolent individual action.
Real censorship includes prisons, fines, forced labor, police who actually confiscate and destroy books, house arrest, book-burnings, boards that control the channels of distribution ... and these penalties can be levied on readers as well as creators and distributors.

Yes, yes. I do understand the difference between state censorship and what happened with Dark Horse.

But after all, our entire concept of 'banned books' (at least in America) and therefore this entire group is based more on defending books that have been attacked by consumer activism than any real state censorship.

My thread here is more about the things I had read from people who should know better. It was the tone and attitude of the people on the message boards I visited while reading about this. The overwhelming majority of people against the Gor comics were of the opinion that they should not be allowed to be published. They were trying to classify these crappy misogynist books as hate speech. These were posts from people who had never read the books.

I haven't read the books either. Nor do I care to. But I also know that I am therefore not qualified to say that they should not be published by Dark Horse. And I would never say something should not be allowed to be published period by anyone.

(Edited to cut down on my natural repetitiveness!)

"should not be allowed to be published" is certainly different than "should not be published". I *have* read the Gor books, and the miserable quality of their writing alone should put them in the latter category. I wonder if Dark Horse editors finally read them.

Pat Califia extolled them in an early book ... Sensuous Magic, I think, but porn-value aside, the execrable writing quality is what I mostly remember about them.

Funnily enough, at one point I had a copy of Tarnsman of Gor that was sent to me by my grandma! (Along with a few other books.) She was a reader of sci-fi, but I always wondered if she actually read that book before she sent it to me.

I never read it because it didn't look like my kind of thing. It was only years later that I heard about the BDSM philosophy the series espoused.

Grandma, I never really knew you...

I don't think the, um, gender relations in the Gor books are any different from the default in sword & sorcery settings. It's just that the Gor books took them and extrapolated the kind of society that would have produced those mores.

I'd love to see graphic novels of them. That way I wouldn't have to read the writing, and could just look at the pictures ;)

There's also a Gor movie, but I've seen only fragments of it.

Good lord amtep, don't ask me why I have so much useless knowledge, but there are two Gor movies. Gor and Outlaw of Gor. I know nothing about them except that one was lampooned on MST3K.

When I was doing my research on Dark Horse cancelling Gor, I found out there was already a Gor comic series put out by somebody called Vision Inc or Vision Enterprise or something like that.