Life & Wisdom Quote by Neil Gaiman

Comics are where free speech gets mugged in a cheap alley: low-status, brightly colored, and easy to scapegoat. Neil Gaiman is pointing to a recurring political trick in democracies that want to look principled while tightening the screws. You don’t start censorship with Shakespeare; you start with the medium that’s already coded as disposable, “for kids,” or morally suspicious. That’s the “nice, easy place” in his line: not a comfort, a vulnerability. Erosion works best when it feels like housekeeping.

The election detail is the tell. Campaign seasons incentivize simple villains and symbolic victories. “Protecting children” is a ready-made headline, and comics have historically been the perfect prop: visible, mass-produced, and easy to frame as cultural contamination. Gaiman’s subtext is that moral panic is rarely about the alleged harm on the page; it’s about power practicing its techniques in public. If you can get voters to accept policing jokes, drawings, and fantasy, you normalize the idea that expression is conditional on public comfort.

Gaiman also understands comics as a gateway medium, shaping how people learn to read stories, politics, and identity. Targeting comics isn’t only about silencing creators; it’s about training audiences to expect guardrails. The cynicism lands because it’s observational, not theoretical: elections don’t just test candidates, they test how far a society will let fear masquerade as taste.