Well, Hellboy was technically born in 1945...

Fresh off the presses, direct to you, the fan, comes Liberty Comics #1, a hilarious new parody issue from Image Comics! Yes, Liberty Comics #1 features a farrago of fan-favorite scribes and artists doing side-splitting impersonations of self-serving celebrities who organize charities that benefit themsel—

Wait a minute…ohhhhh no. Oh crap, all of this is serious? Oh geez…oh wow…um, this is embarrassing. Not just for me—for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, too.  

In Liberty Comics #1, which is apparently meant in earnest, some of comics’ biggest names come together to hurl invective and facile dichotomies at unsuspecting readers everywhere. It’s for a good cause, though—first amendment rights! Which I guess means comic book fans in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and countries that don’t subscribe to the American Constitution don’t count…

The problem with Liberty Comics #1 isn’t so much the unintentional hilarity of artists and writers passing off four-page, phone-it-in stories as charity. It also isn’t the fact that only one of these stories, Scott Dunbier’s “The Auteur,” is entertaining. It’s how medieval the whole censorship/freedom of speech dichotomy is.

Back in the 1950s, when guys dressed like Judge Doom raided smut shops and burned books with titles like “Horny Peeping Librarian,*” a comic like this would have been daring and timely. In the internet age, however, it’s as dated as EC Comics. As most of you probably know, you can publish nearly anything you want online (if you don’t live in red China, at least). For our parents’ generation, the issue was about censorship vs. freedom of speech. For those of us born since 1980, the internet has made that question moot. So where does that leave those of us who don’t get senior citizen benefits?  

It leaves us in a (legitimately) brave new world. The ability to publish that the internet gives us means that the question is no longer about freedom. Freedom’s here to stay. Want to censor something online? Try and stop it. Just don’t be surprised if what was censored pops up, again, a few days later. The real question isn’t about the right to publish, but about what people do with their right to publish—write great stories with a genuine social conscience, or dull, insular yarns that only help people in one’s own line of work.

Though I’ll bet writing self-serving stories feels pretty good.

Worth the money? Save your four bucks for a worthier charity, like those Elephantmen writer Richard Starkings alerts the reader to: the “women raped and murdered in Darfur,” or victims of leukemia, or the adolescent girls abducted and sold into prostitution every year, all over the world.

*actual smut book. The cover is hilariously stupid.