This podcast is a conversation between political cartoonist Martin Rowson and writer Neil Gaiman, originally recorded for Index on Censorship.

In it, Gaiman and Rowson talk about Alan Moore and Milo Minara, whether comics are unrepentantly in the gutter,  how the work of Hogarth and Gilray speaks across the centuries, how the bible contains more shocking stuff than they could make up, and how as children and teenagers they were enthralled by Judge Dredd.

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Martin Rowson:   I wanted to talk about various themes. I wanted to talk about the visual and I wanted to talk about offence - how things are offensive and why they are in different ways. Have you caught up on this nonsense over here on Hilary Mantel’s short story the Assassination of Margaret Thatcher?

Neil Gaiman: Yes! I thought it was wonderful. I haven’t read the story, but I’ve read an interview with her and saw the thing from Sir Lord Emperor Bell.  I thought it was wonderful that column inches in newspapers were being given to a short story.

Neil Gaiman (pic by Mika Stetsovski)

There’s part of you that’s going, as long as people are getting upset, then a medium is not dead. And as long as a poem could send the editor of Gay News to prison in 1979 you knew that poetry was not dead. And as long as Tim Bell can call for the arrest of Hilary Mantel for writing a story you know that the short story is not dead.

Having said that, what for me immediately flashed up was some of these cases in America - some stuff that I’ve dealt with directly and some stuff that has just crossed my screen - where people would find themselves essentially arrested for ‘thought crimes’. Where people would write short stories -  in which people would die, in which illegal sexual acts would occur, in which bad things happened -  and find themselves under arrest, find themselves losing their jobs.

MR: It’s happening here, people sending texts about legal practices like fisting, it’s illegal to send a text about a legal practice like fisting.    Likewise.  I was tweeting last week about how grateful I was that Tim Bell showed himself to be so indestructibly stupid to actually say somebody’s got to be investigated by the police because of something they’ve made up in their head, which hasn’t happened, which isn’t real. I’ve got a quote here, “A nice easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.”

We’re both of an age where we can remember they were impounding Robert Crumb coming into Britain in the late 70s.

NG: The last Robert Crumb thing that I remember was about 1987 or 1988 and it was particularly notable because on the one hand customs were impounding Crumb stuff coming into the country and it was stuff being imported to tie in with a BBC 2 Arena special on Robert Crumb!

MR: I always feel very uneasy about attempts to make the medium respectable. I actually think when there are Arena specials about Robert Crumb, that’s when the medium is dying. Attempts to turn what is essentially a specific genre which works in a specific way within the ecology of all fiction, shouldn’t be up there with the Booker Prize. It shouldn’t be treated as if it is respectable. That’s probably the satirist in me, because in the word of newspapers, I am down in the servants' quarters drinking Mackeson, while my journalist colleagues are up in the drawing room drinking schooners of sherry!  But you are a global star, treated with respect by a large group of people – don’t you feel that you should being doing something to get your books burnt in the high streets of America and indeed Britain?

NG: You covered three different things here. You’ve nipped carefully from topic to topic. The first is comics as gutter medium, yes or no? I would definitely put my vote in for yes. Partly because I loved being part of a gutter medium. I loved the fact that most of my life was spent writing comics an...

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