Dragon Ball, Volume 1: The Monkey King, a manga repackaged in English as a graphic novel, has been pulled from the library shelves of a Maryland middle school for its sexual content. The mother of a 9-year old raised questions about the manga after her son brought it home.
The Dragon Ball graphic novel, upon which the immensely popular cartoon was based, contains several frames in which the central character is naked. Another sequence finds a grown man asking a young girl about her bra. The central character also engages in inappropriate (though not explicit) contact with a sleeping girl.
The Weirding is a huge proponent of free speech, and often rails against the banning of books - especially in schools (where they are most likely to suffer such an outrage), but this may be an exception which proves the rule; it's understandable that parents wouldn't want their pre-teen children exposed to this material. It isn't censorship; not all material is appropriate for all age groups, and while I am not familiar with the book in question, it definitely sounds inappropriate for the age group.
© C Harris Lynn, 2009
A rambling melange of pop-culture.
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