Justice & Law Quote by Gilbert Hernandez

There is a sly triumph in the way Hernandez frames victory as something almost procedural: a court "took another look" and reality snapped into place. The line is less chest-thumping than it is quietly incredulous that the burden of proof ever sat on the artist in the first place. He lets the system indict itself. A state apparatus that once declared the work obscene now reverses course, and the artist is left sounding relieved, not vindictive. That restraint is the point.

The subtext is about gatekeeping disguised as morality. "Obscene" is the oldest bureaucratic shortcut for shutting down art that won’t behave - especially work that depicts sex, bodies, or cultural identities without asking permission. Hernandez, whose comics have long tested the border between intimacy and propriety, understands that censorship rarely argues aesthetics; it argues control. When he says "allowed it into the country", he’s treating the comic like contraband, which is exactly how authorities treat images that might circulate new ideas about desire, power, and agency.

The South African detail matters. Coming from a nation with a long history of state control over expression, the reversal hints at a society renegotiating its relationship to speech and representation. Hernandez’s happiness reads bigger than personal success: it’s a small institutional admission that the public can be trusted with complexity. The quote works because it makes freedom feel mundane - and in doing so, shows how absurd it is that it ever needed permission.