by Justin Hall

About Justin Hall

Justin Hall is Associate Professor of Comics at the California College of the Arts and the creator of the comics series Hard to Swallow (with Dave Davenport), True Travel Tales, and Glamazonia. He has stories published in the Houghton Mifflin Best American Comics, QU33R, Best Erotic Comics, and the SF Weekly, among others, and has exhibited his art in galleries and museums internationally. He edited the Lambda Literary Award–winning, Eisner-nominated No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, which he is now producing as a feature-length documentary film.

Pornography

book Keywords for Comics Studies

Comics have a long and complicated relationship with pornography. Comics have long been associated with the lowbrow and potentially harmful, a cultural space also inhabited by pornography; both have seen censorship, regulation, and book burnings on large scales (Hajdu 1999, 7). Of course, comics are a medium, while pornography—by which I mean art and storytelling intended to arouse sexual excitement—is a genre; it is their intersection, however, that is of particular interest to me, where the unique language of comics creates stories that both engage and expand erotic imaginations.