Now it’s personal.

This one slipped by me. According to Wikipedia, in 2003, Bush signed into law the PROTECT Act of 2003. This law among other things makes the depictions we see all the time in hentai manga illegal, because they are of underage girls engaging in sex.

This, however, contradicts a Supreme Court upturn of the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996 which did the same thing. The Supreme Court, as it applied to that law, said it “prohibits speech that records no crime and creates no victims by its production,” presumably because they are only products of the imagination and not real people. The court deemed that portion of the law unconstitutional in 2002 and reaffirmed it in 2004.

The ACLU, according to the Wiki entry, hasn’t come across a suitable case to challenge the constitutionality in the assumed jurisdiction over the imagination.

One of my favorite hentais is by a great artist named Kisaragi Gunma, entitled “Love Selection.”
In it high school girls with big knockers have in-class sex sessions. The artwork is terrific. I’m always having to Windex the computer monitor. By the way, ninety percent of hentai is a fucking snooze: shy boy gets with shy girl, she blows him, they have vanilla sex. This one, however, has great student-with-student and student-with-teacher classroom orgies. If the students in this were depicted as more childlike like many others I have seen, it might be considered illegal.

I would wager by my anecdotal dealings with hentai, admittedly not an expert in the field, that at least 50% comic works—undoubtedly more—depict junior high girls or younger engaging in coerced or mutually consenting sweet, slutty, flesh-rubbing sex.

Interestingly, many styles of Japanese artists have the adult characters rendered in the big-eyed, childlike way, yet the characters are explicitly defined in dialogue as being twenty-somethings or older. This makes things really murky: what is legal and what isn’t? If I am an artist in America creating Japanese style manga, just how big do I make the eyes and how big do I make the breasts for it to be deemed “adult”?

I have to now ask these questions because I have a week off coming up and I wanted to try my hand at comic book creation, using my own art style but mixing in Japanese influence. I thought I might create a piece that has action or suspense combined with XXX sex, in the style of Mezzo Forte and _Kite _(always buy the director’s cut if you want the raunch). The director of these two movies didn’t create movies for the sole purpose of masturbation, but rather the hardcore sex is icing on the violently bloody cake.

So, I hope I can find a story to accommodate next week’s comic creation. Q–Pounder, I’m looking in your direction. Wish me luck and wisdom to know how young to make my characters.