Apple Bans Murderdrome Comic from App Store

Posted on August 28, 2008

Apple has banned a violent comic strip named Murderdrome from its Apple App Store. The move has infuriated comic fans reports Fortune'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.

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.