Apple Bans Issue Of Brian K. Vaughan’s Saga Due To Small Images Of Gay Sex
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We all know how well rampant homophobia helps out people’s careers, mostly by making all the rational people around them back the hell away. Yeah, I’m talking about Orson Scott Card here. But he’s far from the only person out there with obvious discomfort when it comes to all things homosexual. He’s just damned vocal about it.
But having something against two human beings of the same sex having a relationship is still a world away from having a problem with seeing such a thing represented in a drawing, right? Because no one could be that shallow, right? Well, we know where Apple stands, because they’re refusing to sell issue #12 of Brian K. Vaughan’s brilliant space opera comic Saga on any of their iOS apps.
Saga, by no means a comic for all ages, made our Best of 2012 list due to its highly intriguing tale of love in a universe that allows for everything but. I wonder where Vaughan got the inspiration for that kind of universe. It’s probably the one where one of the most successful companies on the planet can’t handle two artistic images of gay sex. Apples are known for having little worms in them, so perhaps Apple CEO Timothy D. Cook has a little secret tucked up in his multi-million-dollar closet.
Vaughan says it best himself in the press release he put out:
As has hopefully been clear from the first page of our first issue, SAGA is a series for the proverbial ‘mature reader.’ Unfortunately, because of two postage stamp-sized images of gay sex, Apple is banning tomorrow’s SAGA #12 from being sold through any iOS apps. This is a drag, especially because our book has featured what I would consider much more graphic imagery in the past, but there you go. Fiona and I could always edit the images in question, but everything we put into the book is there to advance our story, not (just) to shock or titillate, so we’re not changing shit.
It’s worth noting that Apple has in the past had no problem with scenes in Saga depicting sexuality between different species, or, to get more specific, a shot of a man with a television head taking a woman with a television head from behind.
Vaughan goes on to list all the other ways people can acquire the comic that have nothing to do with Apple’s bigoted ass. Perhaps we can all use one of Apple’s other apps, perhaps Draw Something, and draw a whole bunch of same-sex doodling to email them and post on their websites. We’re mature comic-reading adults, right?
