Well, I blogged about this great idea just the other day, but it seems that Apple will not allow the comic to be distributed through their iPhone store, stating

“Murderdrome cannot be posted to the App Store because it contains content that does not comply with Community Standards” and “Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

Quite frankly, this is ridiculous when you consider what you are allowed to purchase through the Apple store in other media. You are allowed to purchase violent movies from Apple to play on your iPod, or songs containing violent or sexual lyrics. ‘Muderdrome’ is drawn in a rather cartoony style, it’s hard to think that anyone could be truly offended by the unrealistic violence within it’s pages. Let’s be honest, if someone is likely to be offended by the material contained within the comic, it is highly unlikely that they will be prone to download an application with a name such as ‘Muderdrome’ in the first place.

The question this really prompts is “Where does this censorship end?”. If Marvel were to distribute X-Men, or Avengers or any number of other titles through the App store, would the violence contained within those pages pass Apple’s censorship restrictions. Really, they need a board of moderators to judge ages restrictions on titles. Since one needs a credit card to download apps in the first place, does this not count as a marker of the downloader’s age? Could Apple not put some sort of prompt before allowing the download, which asks the user to verify that they are over the age of 18.

I am also quite confused because Clickwheel is an available application on the App store, and Clickwheel allows you to read 2000 A.D. which is quite often bloody and violent itself. How come this is OK? Is it because the content is provided through a third party?

This is akin to the censorship that the comic book community encountered in the 1950s, with the implementation of the the Comic Code Authority. I really hope that Apple rescind their decision, and some agreement can be arranged.

The comic’s creator’s are asking that you head over to their website and leave a message saying what you think of Apple’s decision (in a nice way). They intend to forward to comments to Apple. Visit Infurious Comics for more info

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