I suspect that the reason why it seems so simple to me and to those of us from the world of comics is that we are used to having to defend our work against people who want it—and us—off the shelves.

The first comics work I was ever paid for was in the 1987 Knockabout Comics book Outrageous Tales from the Old Testament. I was one of a few writers and I retold several stories, mostly from the Book of Judges. One story immediately got us into trouble: an account of the attempted rape of a male traveler to a town, thwarted by a host who offers the rapists his virgin daughter and the traveler’s concubine. A gang rape follows and the traveler takes his concubine’s corpse home, cuts it up and sends a segment of it to each of the tribes of Israel. (It’s Judges 19 if you want to go and look, and it’s pretty noxious.)

I was twenty-six and soon after publication I found myself on the radio defending the book, as a Tory MP complained about the lack of prosecutions for criminal blasphemy and how both the book and those who made it should be locked up; I watched the Sun attempt to stir up popular anger against it; and then, a few years later, I watched the Swedish publisher of the book fight to stay out of prison for publishing it over there.

Outrageous Tales was, let us make no bones of it, an offensive comic (we weren’t using the phrase “graphic novel” much yet in 1987). Its purpose, at least as far as I was concerned, was to shock, to point out that the Bible contained material that was outrageously unpleasant and to bring that out into the open, to let it be talked about, seen, discussed. The book existed, in part, to shock and to offend, because it was a reaction to material in the Bible that we found shocking and offensive.

In retrospect, I am glad I was not sentenced to prison for blasphemous libel, like Denis Lemon a decade earlier; glad that Knockabout’s Swedish publisher got off; and doubly glad that the fundamentalist Christian extremists back then mostly reserved their murders for doctors who performed abortions and did not, to the best of my knowledge, kill people who wrote or drew comics.

Comics and cartoons can viscerally upset and offend people. Cartoons and comics get banned and cartoonists get imprisoned and killed. Some comics are hard to defend, especially if you prefer prettier drawing styles, lack cultural context, or were hoping for subtlety. But that does not mean that they should not be defended.

Back beneath the fiberglass blue whale, Gérard Biard, the editor in chief of Charlie Hebdo, concludes his speech. “Growing up to be a citizen,” he reminds us, “is to learn that some ideas, some words, some images can be shocking. Being shocked is part of democratic debate. Being shot is not.”

Originally published in the May 27, 2015, issue of the New Statesman, “Saying the Unsayable,” which was guest-edited by me and by Amanda Palmer.