Announcing the winners of this year’s contest!

2025 Grand Prize: Ingo Taylor — The Red Scare
Artistry: Alyssa Hwee — Of Kings and Queens
Storytelling: Ana Gonzalez — Blacklisted. Hollywood 1950
Research: Naomy Cardoso Perez — To and From Guantanamo Bay
Honorable mention: Heciel — Carpetas. | 1. Vuelo Blanco;
Winston Broiles — The Boondocks; Nathan Persson – The War on Degenerate Art

View their award-winning artwork on Scholars Compass!

The 2024-2025 challenge

Imagine a comic book centered around the suppression or censorship of visual art, books, music, film or performance at a particular historical moment. You might tell this story using any one of a number of comic book genres such as real life, comedy, horror, romance, weird/uncanny, fantasy or science fiction.
Now draw only the comic book’s cover.

Winning entries needed to

• Stimulate readers’ interest in a story centered on a specific historical incident of censorship or suppression and the ideas and issues at stake
• Skillfully and engagingly communicate an understanding of the event
• Demonstrate innovative use of the standard U.S. comic book cover format
• Suggest one or more of the larger issues you’d imagine including in your comic such as censorship and self-censorship, art as a business vs. art for self-expression, art and its audiences, and the tension between artistic freedom and community standards

Prizes

• Grand prize (Best overall): $1,000 and print and digital publication
• Artistry $250 and print and digital publication
• Storytelling $250 and print and digital publication
• Research $250 and print and digital publication
• All entries considered for digital publication as honorable mentions
• Only one prize per person

---

Getting started

Among the many examples of art censorship:

• Tom and Dick Smothers were “dangerously funny” comedians who challenged the censors at CBS with political humor on their The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. Pete Seeger’s performance of the song “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy” was famously cut from the show.
• The repeated censorship of director Amy Heckerling’s film Fast Times at Ridgemont High
• The attempted censorship of “Judgment Day” a comic in EC Comics Weird Fantasy, No. 18, March/April 1953

• Opposition to The Rabbits’ Wedding a children’s picture book by Garth Williams, illustrator of Charlotte’s Web
• Marina Abramović’s Imponderabilia, shut down as obscene in 1977, is adapted by the artist for a 2023 retrospective.
• Challenges and bannings of Persepolis Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir
• The banning of Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice by James Branch Cabell
• Nazi Party suppression of German modernist art, which was labelled “Degenerate Art“
• PEN America v. Escambia County School District – a recent lawsuit asserting that Florida County School Board unlawfully removes or restricts access to books on race, racism and LGBTQ identities
• FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words” routine for which the comedian was arrested.)
• Police stand by during a 1960 Tom Lehrer concert to prevent the satirical songwriter from performing several darkly humorous and “tasteless” numbers.
• In January  2025, after The Washington Post refuses to publish a cartoon critical of the newspaper’s owner and other billionaires, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigns.

Other resources:

• The world’s first museum of censored art, The Museu de l’Art Prohibit.
• PEN American Index of School Book Bans – 2022 -2023
• Banned Comics: Case Files, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
• Banning Books in Prisons, Equal Justice Initiative
• VCU Access to The Washington Post and The New York Times
• Jurgen Banned Art Comics Contest Research Guide

---

Submission requirements

Eligibility: VCU students enrolled in 9 or more credit hours during the Fall 2024 semester. Part-time VCU students, including university employees who are taking classes, are also encouraged to participate. Their entries are eligible for digital publication, but will not be considered for cash prizes.