Wired posted a brief analysis of the obscenity charges brought against U.S. manga collector Christopher Handley, who was arrested for trafficking in ‘obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children’, aka smutty manga. AnaKhouri has blogged about this in the past, so I won’t gild the lily so-to-speak, but Wired’s piece is worth checking out.

The case began in 2006, when customs officials intercepted and opened a package from Japan addressed to Handley. Seven books of manga inside contained cartoon drawings of minors engaged in sexually explicit acts. One book included depictions of bestiality, according to stipulations in Handley’s plea deal.

Frenchy Lunning, a manga expert at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, was a consultant in the case. She says the books were from the widely available Lolicon variety — a Japanese word play on “Lolita.”

“This stuff is huge in Japan, in all of Asia,” Lunning says. Handley, she adds, “is not a pedophile. He had no photographs of child pornography.”