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Several naughty words and several black boxes, I gather.

What puzzles me is the suggestion that the dialog in the word balloons might have printed in a four-color black (essentially, solid black backed up with a small percentage of the other process colors), while the bar that was supposed to obscure it was just a flat black, and not adequately opaque. "Backing up the black" as it's called, is often used to give large flat black areas a more "rich" (and less washed out) appearance, or to ward off problems with trapping (when registration is slightly off) -- but what strikes me as odd is that there's really no need to do that with a fine detail like lettering. It's not really necessary, and against a white background, that would betray even the slightest misregistration. (And even as comics printing and coloring have become more elaborate through the years, lettering inside baloons and caption boxes was genenerally left as only black because it was easiest to strip out that detail from just that one plate for foreign licensees and reprints.)

And before the usual suspects start speculating on who might lose a job over this, this is an error that would be difficult, if not impossible to spot without a very specific type of proof, or a press proof. (It was probably caught on one of the unbound "last chance copies," when the books have been printed and bound, but there's still time to do something.)

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Are retailers contractually obligated to comply with DC's request?

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I don't think so. And it's not something DC seems to go to great lengths to enforce.

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Some have suggested that by not requiring retailers to provide evidence of the destroyed copies, some customers who don't normally pick up the book will be seeking out the naughty version... and that if you get more copies into the hands of more people, then a few of them might be inclined to pick up issue #11.

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I doubt there's any ulterior motive involved -- it's just easier to ask that retailers honor the request to dispose of the books than to make arrangements to have them returned, pay for shipping or credit accounts for the expense just to dispose of them.

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This sounds like the writings of a 13-year-old who thinks being cool and cutting edge is to be vulgar.

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I'll admit, I was reading the few pages completely out of context -- but stuff like this makes me sad that we still haven't found a happy medium where comics can appeal to adults without being completely inappropriate for a younger audience.

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The prudish right-wing goal of trying to "shelter" youngsters from arbitrarily transgressive language is an impossible fool's errand. By the time they've finished kindergarten at the latest, nearly every child in the English-speaking world knows just about every so-called swear word that is still in current usage.

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It's not just the language I'm referring to. In fact, it's not really even just this story -- it's just mainstream super-hero comics in general. I believe it's entirely possible to tell good stories that appeal to a wide audience, that can be entertaining for adults without having content that common sense would tell you is inappropriate, to a certain degree, for a younger audience. It's isn't that there shouldn't be comics (like this) intended for a more mature audience (of any age), but these days it seems that's all there is. (If anything, the closest we seem to get are kids books that just happen to appeal to adults, as well.) I think that's too bad.

And you can call it "arbitrary transgressive language" all you like, but I don't think there's anything particularly "prudish" or "right-wing" about encouraging kids to use language intelligently. As it happens, my son just started in the first grade -- he picked up a few bad habits last year, but using bad language thankfully hasn't been one of them. (He makes up his own.)