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A panel from "This One Summer," by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

(Courtesy First Second)

Should you make your way to the Rose City Comic Con this weekend, track down a copy of "This One Summer" by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki.

It's a memorable graphic novel, a Caldecott Honor award winner. And it's one more expressive reason why the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, set for the end of September, is still an annual event.

Awago Beach is the summer retreat for Rose Wallace and her parents, a cottage town where "everyone can sleep in until eleven," exhausted by the familiar. It's also a beach reunion with Windy, who is 18 months younger than Rose and not nearly as intrigued by the clerk at the town store.

This summer, however, nerves are on edge. Rose's parents are quarreling when they brush against one another. Someone is pregnant in the group of older teens who hang out behind the store.

If Mariko and Jillian Tamaki, Canadian cousins, handle those subplots with thoughtfulness and grace, several school districts haven't.

After the parents of a third-grader in Longwood, Fla., complained about profanity in the book in February, the school district not only removed it from the elementary school but restricted access at three area high schools.

And in Henning, Minn., "This One Summer" was pulled from the library of a K-12 school in May after Superintendent Jeremy Olson declared the book "pervasively vulgar."

That's an infamous phrase - borrowed from a 1982 Supreme Court decision involving the works of Richard Wright, Eldridge Cleaver and Langston Hughes - and it is both vicious and absurd.

There's no nudity in "This One Summer," notes Charles Brownstein, executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund:

"The profanity is the profanity of that age group. And the moral dilemmas addressed in the book are the moral dilemmas of that time of life."

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which moved its headquarters from New York to Portland in June, has defended First Amendment rights in the comics' world for the last 30 years.

In our digital age, libraries, bookstores and comic shops are still heated interchanges in disputes over the power of words and images.

Witness the case of Shakespeare Books & Antiques in Ashland. When store owner Judi Honore included a 1937 copy of "Little Black Sambo" in her banned-book display, Cynthia Rider, executive director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, wrote to tell her the display was "hurtful and offensive."

Honore kept the display intact, so Rider instructed her staff to stay clear of the store in all festival-related purchases. At the end of August, the Ashland Daily Tidings reported, Honore announced the store would close as a result of that boycott.

Comics are mainstays on the American Library Association's annual list of the ten books most often challenged by parents hoping to ban or restrict them in libraries.

The 2016 list has two graphic novels: "Habibi" by Portland's Craig Thompson, and Alison Bechdel's "Fun Home."

And Raina Telgemeier's "Drama" topped the charts in 2015, thanks to a chaste kiss between same-sex middle-school characters.

Charles Brownstein

As Brownstein notes, "This One Summer" ran into trouble when it became the first graphic novel to receive the Caldecott Honor.

"Because it was acknowledged on the Caldecott short list, it was automatically bought for lower grade collections that it wasn't appropriate for," Brownstein notes. "No one is arguing the book is appropriate for first-and-second graders, the way most Caldecott books are."

First Second, the publisher, recommends the book for readers 12 and up.

If I had a third-grader quoting liberally from "This One Summer," I, too, might have some questions. But how does that escalate into a panicked demand that the book be banned for everyone in the neighborhood?

"Are you really upset about the content of 'This One Summer, and that fact that it talks about teen pregnancy and miscarriage?" Brownstein asks. "Or are you worried about your kid at an age when these are legitimate issues?"

"If you as a parent don't want a book in your home, that's your right. That's a matter of how you raise your children," Brownstein adds.

"But one individual doesn't have a right to determine how a community raises its kids."

In Florida and Minnesota, cooler heads eventually stumbled on to the same conclusion. "This One Summer" was returned to the unrestricted high-school shelves in Florida. In Henning, high-schoolers can access the graphic novel only with parental permission.

While she appreciate that "all publicity is good publicity," Mariko Tamaki writes in an email, "It is a bummer to think there are kids who are having books pulled from the shelves of their libraries, especially when that's where kids get access to so many different kinds of reading experiences."

Especially when the words and pictures are so marvelously joined.

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com