John Paczkowski writes for All Things Digital on the Wall Street Journal:

Apple is being accused of censorship after banning the Murderdrome comic from the App Store for violating the terms of its SDK, which prohibits “content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes for FORTUNE magazine on CNN Money.

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.

Stephen Withers writes for ITWire

Apple already tags tracks in the iTunes Store that are unsuitable for children and it sells R rated movies, so why isn’t there something similar for content such as books and comics in the App Store?

The call to add age categorisation comes after Apple ruled Belfast-based Infurious Comics’ Murderdrome did not comply with the App Store’s content guidelines.

Infurious officials described the free comic as “darkly humorous.”

The company has “already secured another script and art and will be submitting another comic written and drawn specifically for the iPhone/iPod touch to the App Store in the next few days and has commitments from established creators for exclusive content

Jack Schofield from The Guardian writes:

Apple may be worried that iPhone users don’t have quite enough braincells to figure out that if they buy something called Murderdrome, they are not going to get a Disneyfied version of Peter Rabbit and the Flopsy Bunnies. Or maybe they are just being protective of the huge number of iPhone buyers who are under the age of 14….. Either way, couldn’t the problem be solved by having a ratings system, as InfuriousComics suggests?