Latest Issue Of Digital Comic Saga “Banned” From App Store For Depiction Of Gay Sex

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Another publisher is feigning surprise about Apple’s App Store policies today, claiming that Cupertino has “banned” an upcoming issue of a digital combic book from being sold in any iOS app due to “two postage stamp-sized images of gay sex.”

The comic in question is called Saga. Published by Image Comics and written by famous comics writer Brian K. Vaughan (who was behind the fantastic Vertigo series Y: The Last Man), Saga aims to be Star Wars meets Game of Thrones: a space opera with a lot of violence, profanity and sexposition.

But while previous issues of Saga were sold through apps like the Image Comics, Saga #12 will not be sold digitally on iOS.

Over on the official Image Comics Tumblr, Vaughan writes:

As has hopefully been clear from the first page of our first issue, SAGA is a series for the proverbial “mature reader.” Unfortunately, because of two postage stamp-sized images of gay sex, Apple is banning tomorrow’s SAGA #12 from being sold through any iOS apps. This is a drag, especially because our book has featured what I would consider much more graphic imagery in the past, but there you go. Fiona and I could always edit the images in question, but everything we put into the book is there to advance our story, not (just) to shock or titillate, so we’re not changing shit.

Like them or not, Apple’s policy on things like graphic sex in-app are pretty explicitly stated, so it seems a little disingenuous to make like this was a surprise, but Vaughan is right that there is a double-standard here, where graphic violence is okay content on the App Store but much less graphic depictions of sexual encounters between adults are not.

Source: Image Comics

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