Comic Shop Owner Facing Felony Obscenity Charges For Allegedly Giving ‘Grendel’ Issue To Halloween Trick-Or-Treater
Rather than ghosts, ghouls, or goblins, the scariest thing to haunt the city of Sunset Beach, North Carolina this past Halloween was instead an issue of Matt Wagner’s Grendel, the apparent distribution of which to a young trick-or-treater has led to local comic shop owner Kathleen Lincoln being hit with felony obscenity charges.
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As recapped by the Sunset Beach Police Department via their official Facebook page, the incident in question allegedly took place on October 30th, when during the city’s annual Trunk-or-Treat event the 59-year-old Lincoln, a registered participant on the ‘Trunk’ side, is said to have given away the first issue of 1993’s Grendel Tales: The Devil’s Hammer to a young attendee.
Made aware of the book’s distribution by concerned parents and subsequently determining its contents were “clearly inappropriate for children”, the SBPD proceeded to present their findings to North Carolina Magistrate Judge Douglas Ritter and found “probable cause” to charge Lincoln with “a violation of North Carolina General Statute § 14-190.1” and sign a warrant for her arrest.
This law, as detailed in the state’s official Criminal Code holds that “It shall be unlawful for any person, firm or corporation to intentionally disseminate obscenity,” itself defined as materials that “depicts or describes in a patently offensive way sexual conduct”, “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” “is not protected or privileged” under either the US or North Carolina Constitutions, and that the “the average person applying contemporary community standards” would find “appeals to the prurient interest [a legal term defined as “a shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion”] in sex”.
Currently free after posting her $20,000 bail, Lincoln is officially accused of “unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously did knowingly disseminate to a minor, Age 6, and thus under the age of 13 tears, a comic book containing images of men and women engaged in sexual conduct, which she knew and reasonably should have known to be obscene within the meaning of General Statute § 14-190.1”
Written and illustrated by Rob Walton with paints from Bernie Mireault and Kathryn Delaney, Grendel Tales: The Devil’s Hammer Vol. 1 #1 opens the tale of Petrus Christus, a Christian man living in the Middle Ages who, after finding himself the lone survivor of his village’s massacre by a group of rogue Grendel acolytes, foolishly attempts to harness the evil spirit’s power in the hopes of turning it against the attackers.
Having more in common with a Bible tale than a letter to Penthouse, while the issue does not depict any explicitly sexual situations, it does contain multiple instances of uncensored, full frontal male nudity, and one particularly gruesome depiction of the Grendel pack’s butchering upon nude male and female bodies [Curious viewers interested in doing so can view a censored version of the page, at their own discretion, here.]
As such, while the issue’s contents do not run afoul of North Carolina’s three possible definitions for “sexual conduct” – those being “Vaginal, anal, or oral intercourse, whether actual or simulated, normal or perverted”, “Masturbation, excretory functions, or lewd exhibition of uncovered genitals”, and “an act or condition that depicts torture, physical restraint by being fettered or bound, or flagellation of or by a nude person or a person clad in undergarments or in revealing or bizarre costume” – said portrayal of the Grendels’ cruelty likely did, even if it was not meant to titillate.
Though Lincoln has not yet offered an official public statement on her arrest, she did post and then quickly deleted a status update to her personal Facebook page announcing that Marvelous Issues Comic Shop is “gonna be closed for a little while”, as shared alongside artist Bill Mauldin’s Weeping Lincoln illustration.
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