Apple has banned a violent comic strip named Murderdrome from its Apple App Store. The move has infuriated comic fans reportsFortune's Apple 2.0 blog.
Murderdrome is not Ulysses, Lolita or Lady Chatterley's Lover. It's a dark, bloody comic strip marked by the type of over-the-top violence that has made its genre so popular among young readers with a lot of pent-up rage.
But Murderdrome has now joined the pantheon of suppressed fiction as the first digital book banished from Apple's App Store by censors in Cupertino.
The comic was banned even though it is a book and not an iPhone applications as Mike Cane explains. Technically, it is Comic Reader that is the application. Infurious Comics posted the complete first episode of Murderdrome and invited supportive comments.
By now, you might have heard that Murderdrome has been banned by Apple. This is due to the part of the sdk that suggests content must NOT offend anyone in 'apple's reasonable' opinion. Here at infurious, we would love to work with Apple to ensure a content rating system can be put in place to allow material that is no more offensive than many of the R rated films available to download on iTunes.
PLEASE leave a comment committing your support to us - we'll forward ALL of these to Apple, so that we can ensure that not only Murderdrome, but that ANY comic submitted to Apple doesn't fall foul of the same censorship.
A content rating system sounds very reasonable. This is something Apple should implement if they are worried about the kind of content being published on iTunes.