Valley of the Prudes

"It's their rules. We're coming to their dinner party at their house." - Robert Berry

Berry, quoted in an article by Julie Bosman, is the illustrator of Ulysses Seen, "a Web comic version" of James Joyce's Ulysses. Not surprisingly, the work features some nudity. When Berry's publisher, Throwaway Horse, proposed to port it to the iPad, Apple demanded that it be blanked out. The result, as shown in the New York Times, is a re-sized image. (Apple rejected other solutions.) "We basically had to lose all of her body and just tighten in on her face," Berry said. It's odd but somehow fitting that a Victorian prudishness has broken out in Apple's command-and-control world - ideal for the China market, of course. I wonder what they'll do with Manet, for example?