Brian K Vaughan and Fiona Staple's Saga is a brilliant comic book for adults. "For adults" both because it deals with mature themes of family, war and the power of stories. Also because it has some fairly frank depictions of both sex and violence. It's the former that caused trouble when the twelfth issue of the series was published as a digital title; or rather, when it wasn't published. Where previous issues of Saga had seen multiple graphic depictions of heterosexual sex, it was #12 - which included two very brief, very small drawings of sex between two men (displayed on the screen of a robot race that has TVs for heads, long story) - that was missing from Apple's app store on release. Conspiracy theories abounded: Apple had banned the comic! True, the company does have some weirdly strict content rules, even when titles can be put behind age barriers to make sure kids under the age of 18 can access grown-up stuff. But it had allowed straight sex to appear in the comic before? So Apple must be homophobic! It turned out to not involve Apple at all, really. Actually, it was the fault of Comixology, the digital comics app in question. They hadn't bothered to submit it to Apple, based on their reading of the company's content guidelines. And not bothered to explain that to anyone, even Vaughan and Staples themselves. It was a bizarre act of self-censorship that might not bode well for the future of digital comics (but could bode very well for future articles on the topic of banned comics).
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/
