Who
is... Donna Barr? Donna
Barr has been drawing since 1954, writing since 1962, published since 1986,
and publishing since 1996.
She has a Bachelors' Degree in German, and
is a veteran of the United States Army (1970-1973).
Readers worldwide
follower her THE DESERT PEACH, STINZ, BOSOM ENEMIES, HADER
AND THE COLONEL, among others.
She is recognized by her peers as
a pioneer in the field of drawn books and their use in new technologies of distribution
and reproduction. She is a contributor to the world's largest webcomics site,
moderntales.com, and its affiliate
sites.
She achieved her lifetime career goal in 2004 when her life's
work -- past, present and future -- has been accepted as part of the San Diego
State University's Library's Special Collection, and will be available to students
and professors for research, and to the public for exhibits.
She can
be emailed at barr at stinz dot com (remove spam barriers). She answers. Keep
the sentences short.
Your Kids Are MINE (What can I get for the blond/es in Thailand?) By Donna Barr
Hi, parents.
Especially you approaching my exhibit at San Diego Comicon.
Or rather, your unaccompanied minor children approaching my exhibit at San Diego Comicon.
San Diego Comicon International – in collusion with San Diego -- has just given me full powers in loco parentis to act as parent to your minor child if you are not with him or her within the Convention Center.
How’d they do this?
Simple. The same way that municipalities all over America are handing over your kids to people you don’t know. On paper. Signed. As a form of legal contract.
San Diego Comicon, in a knee-jerk reaction to “adult” materials on the Convention Floor, has forced all exhibitors to sign a very restrictive, all-encompassing, poorly defined contract based on “local community standards.”
By doing so, wardship of your minor children has been put into my hands – and the hands of all exhibitors – as person responsible for your children’s care, movements, associations or actions on the floor. That includes those people in the porn booths.
As ward of your child, I must protect myself and my business against all possible accusations of mishandling by the absent (negligent) parent (that’s YOU, if you’re not with the kid).
If your minor child approaches my exhibit without your presence, I shall be forced – to accomplish that protection – to contact security, notify them of the presence of an unsupervised minor child, and then turn said child over to security for further action. That’s right. Because I do not wish the wardship of your abandoned child, I will turn said minor over to The State.
I shall not – regardless of the tasteless joke above – take advantage of my temporary stewardship to sell said minor to the Asian Sex Trade. I could, but I won’t. I admit this could be a very lucrative action, and not so difficult in a border port town, but the accounting would just be too messy. I cannot speak for any of my fellow exhibitors.
I might enroll said minor in the Religious Cult of my choice – as the child’s temporary guardian – with full collusion of the parents as could be assumed from the “community standards” clause of the SDCC content contract. Let the absent (negligent) parents pay for getting the kid unhooked from the Hari Krishnas or Uncle Louie’s First Church of the Holy Happy Hood (which is either a segment of the KKK or gang-bangers, I’m not sure which).
The statement said that the materials that must be withheld from children include “nudity.” Does this include lips if you’re a Moslem?
It includes “pornography”. According to MY community standards, pornography is violence. Should I be able to patrol the convention hall and turn in any child, unaccompanied by an adult, who gets to within eyestalk distance of /I>Curse Of The Spawn?
It includes “adult.” To me that means Stupid Adult Tricks. Wars, arguments, prevarications, confusion, lies and gossip. Unpaid bills. Nose hair. Not cutting your fingernails before anal insertion. Body fluids. Stinky armpits. Those floppy arms on women. Wrinkles, bifocals, gas and did we say body fluids? Bald heads. Liver spots. Missing persons. Missing funds. Unpaid mortgages. Cancer. Heart disease. Gout and arthritis. Scabies. And worst of all – (and in this we include a failed one, War) -- RELATIONSHIPS!
You know. Anything in Hey Mister that includes Hideous Mutants. Or the whole of American Splendor.
Stuff that would either go over a kids’ head or make them all sicky to their tum-tums.
There is a lawyer out there trolling for the kind of cases that will involve negligent parents dumping their kids off in comic shops, bookstores or libraries, and then expecting the business or institution to provide free baby-sitting service. Anybody running a business out there had better get the number of the local social services office and report the wandering homeless children to them. Or just call the police and have the tiny liabilities hauled off. You’ll have to do it. Parents all over America are too lazy to take care of their own kids, and expect everything from movies to radio to bowling alleys to control the content intended for adults – which, believe it or not, is ALL of it – to take the place of the parents in controlling what the kids see or read.
These parents have made the rest of us take over their responsibilities, while infringing on our rights, without our cooperation or agreement. Children should only have protection – we, as adults, get full rights as citizens. If you won’t protect your own kids, why would you expect us to shuck our rights AND replace you?
Someday there will be a big ugly class action suite, and there will be a lot of parents who discover, quite suddenly, that their kids no longer belong to them. And that they helped to hand them over to the rest of us. Who will deal with them as we will be forced to, in order to protect ourselves. That’s right, your neglected kids are going into Foster Care. We can’t afford to have them in our libraries, their very presence opening up our public spaces to accusations and prosecutions under “community standards” paragraphs in laws and contracts.
These lawyers just need to look for a big organization with a bunch of bling-bling. And SDCC pretty much fits that bill. Since Hollywood came in on the display floor, there are masses of Dead Presidents that could be yanked out of the whole convention organization, just in a fight over parental vs. public rights and responsibilities. Man. I wonder if you can invest in a lawyer? That would be a more sure thing than Microsoft or ebay. I mean, there are loads of stupid parents and thoughtless organizations out there for a lawyer to rip juicy money-drippin’ holes in. To hell with the commie book business, I would be rolling in it. To be sure, SDCC wouldn’t be around any more – but it’s gotten kind of big anyway, and sooner or later something like that just blows up in pieces anyway. Might as well make me some money while it’s exploding. And SDCC has just handed itself to the courts on a plate. Raw. With wasabi and soy sauce.
You’d think SDCC could have afforded a good lawyer to scope that contract in the first place. Who wrote that thing? Some barracks-room-lawyer with no more clue than the kind of losers who try to tell you about trademark but have never heard of www.copyright.gov ?
Anyway.
And then there are the less scrupulous warders. You know – this kid is mine, I get to do what I want with this kid --? If you think the Michael Jackson case was creepy…
Now -- I can say this to my readers because they have a sense of humor.
And have the brains to be alarmed enough about this accidental abrogation of their parental rights to actually do something about it. And are capable, in their imaginations, of taking the community standards situation to its logical and horrible end.
Then again, my readers are responsible adults, and would never in a billion years think of dumping their kids on me without my permission and full understanding of their own responsibilities (and the understanding that I am a Snake Aunt – the kind of aunt who would let their kids play with snakes). They do their jobs as loving, mature, people who really truly DO care for their kids as human beings, not as floppy pink extensions of their own egos.
Instead of, once again – goddamn it to hell – leaving it to the artist, like me. I’m getting fucking sick of doing this for free. And no doubt the CBLDF is getting fucking sick of blowing all their funds on simple-minded trailer-trash religious (absent negligent) parental shit like this. I just don’t have the time or the funds for all this crap.
HOW much are they willing to pay in Bangkok for a well-dressaged 9-year-old?
