Happy Birthday to Alan Moore, Whose Work Inspired a Superhero Team-Up in Kentucky

Happy birthday to Alan Moore, the writer of such esteemed comic books as From Hell, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Perhaps you know his work from the movies?

To celebrate Mr. Moore’s birthday (not really), two Kentucky library workers were fired for conspiring to keep Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume IV: The Black Dossier from the hands of an 11-year-old girl. The scheme was initially simple: one library worker, appalled by the sexual content of the book, kept checking out the book to keep it from circulation. When the 11-year-old girl placed a hold on it, another library worker-and this is where the real fun starts-accessed the library’s system to remove the hold, thereby preventing the precocious reader from obtaining a copy. Both workers were fired.

The worker who initially kept renewing the book, Sharon Cook, still has it in her possession and is currently being fined 10 cents a day.

The proof is in her knapsack, in a bright yellow flexible file folder, hidden from prying eyes. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume IV: The Black Dossier. It has pink and yellow highlighter tags sticking out, marking the pages that contain explicit sexual content.

And according to Cook:

People prayed over me while I was reading it because I did not want those images in my head.

Harrowing. In fairness to Cook, Black Dossier is highly sexualized, more so than the two previous League of Extraordinary Gentlemen volumes.

And also, the very last section of the book is in 3-D and requires you to read it with these nifty paper-and-plastic goggles. Which probably just intensified the problem.

From: Boing Boing via The Beat