8. Oz, The Underground Comic Where Rupert The Bear Got Busy
What it was: Britain has a long history of obscenity trials. The courts kicked off over the sexy times in DH Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterly's lover, they did the exact same when James Joyce described a woman masturbating (albeit in a typically obtuse way) in Ulysses. So you can imagine how angry they got when people had the nerve to draw sex. In the case of radical satirical magazine Oz, the real outcry was the fact that the character having sex was beloved children's character Rupert The Bear. An issue of the magazine pasted his head onto an obscene Robert Crumb comic, leading to creators Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson going to court under conspiracy to corrupt public morals. What it changed: Oz, obviously, was cancelled. After appealing the conviction and having them overturned, the biggest change in comics specifically was underground publishers being less likely to parody copyrighted figures. In publishing on a wider scale, meanwhile? Dennis became one of the wealthiest publishers in the land, mainly by founding Maxim.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
