In the mid-1990s or so, a controversy flitted across a couple of message boards, triggered by Marvel Comics having committed a fairly egregious faux pas. (Hey, we've already established that I think it's perfectly okay to dredge up ancient news for current blog topics.)

What happened was, through a series of lettering, engraving and proofreading errors that weren't the company's fault, a Marvel character referred to another character by an ethnically insulting word which has no polite meaning. I'm being purposely vague here because I don't want to call attention to the issue in which this happened, even tho the company did the right thing and instantly issued a recall order, trying to gather back as many copies of the offending comic as it could, in order to destroy them and issue a corrected edition.

If you care to sneer at Marvel's political correctitude, go right ahead. Personally, I don't see this as having anything to do with one political point of view or another. Inadvertently or not, hey'd done something that could anger a sizeable number of paying customers. Why wouldn't they do their best to minimize the damage?

On the other hand, the attempt to undo the accident seems like the sort of thing that could make it an instant collector's item. And the recall depended on the cooperation of comic book retailers, some of whom have occasionally been known to put commercial concerns ahead of their desire to save a big company from embarrassment. There was an obvious motivation to pull a few aside and offer them to certain favored customers under the table, at an enhanced price. Misprints are collectable. Look at stamps.

On the third hand (we're talking about comic books, so I can have as many hands as I want), comics retailers are like everyone else, some fine fellows and some mercenary creeps. The situation reached message boards when a few posted about their desire to see the matter end quietly, by cooperating as much as possible with Marvel's effort to stifle the problem. They were morally outraged by the fact that others might be inclined to turn this into a "variant edition" (this was the era of foil and cut-out covers) and make a buck off of its scarcity.

Now, that, if you ask me, is political correctitude. That is, the moral outrage was, not the act of cooperating. People do what they do. No need to get upset about human nature, when a good argument can be made that nobody is really harmed.

Nobody had to turn this into a variant edition. It already was one, by the mere fact of its existence. And nobody had to create artificial scarcity for it, like Marvel did with so many variant covers by limiting the number printed. The attempt to do away with it is what made it scarce, and that's a perfectly natural process. And if anything made it desirable, it wasn't the prospect of seeing a Marvel superhero use a naughty word. It was the fact that a big corporation was trying to keep people from getting it.

Seen that way, it could be thought of as a sporting contest; and a copy of the comic book, a trophy. Marvel tried to destroy it, but the fan who got one anyway had succeeded in doing an end run around them. It doesn't strike me, personally, as a particularly desirable trophy, but I can understand its appeal. (I wish I'd scored a copy of the final issue of Air Pirates Funnies before Disney pulped the entire printrun for copyright violation, justified tho Disney might have been.) Everyone knows Forbidden Fruit tastes better than the kind you can just pick up at the grocery store.

I don't, however, condone or understand the attitude reported on the part of some retailers, who ignored Marvel's recall efforts and simply put it on the stands as usual. Anyone who pays extra for it as Forbidden Fruit knows it's forbidden, and why. But if kids see it in what they think is an ordinary comic book, they're liable to get an impression that's an okay word.

As a controversy, however, this turned out not to have much impact. Consulting a relatively modern edition of Overstreet, I see no Forbidden Fruit Edition listed as an extra-pricey variant — or listed at all, for that matter.

Maybe that means it's so forbidden, Overstreet can't even mention it, despite the fact that it lovingly lists comics mentioned in Seduction of the Innocent, especially those with what Wertham called "injury to the eye motif". That would make it even more valuable than a misprinted stamp.

Or maybe it means they realized it's not really very scarce, and nobody cares anymore.

— DDM