Help Mav Pick a Book List (redux)

Ok, so through a completely unforeseen, unexpected and frankly rather chaotic set of circumstances, I am apparently now suddenly teaching my Sex, Violence and Comics class again this fall. Yay! This is non one hand awesome, because I love that class and teaching it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. On the other hand, last time I spent like a year deciding what I was going to do with it and now I have… well, basically 3.5 days to pick a book list. This is fine… I’m going to just overlap a lot of the stuff I did last time. But on the other hand, I’m always looking for potential to update. So, much like I did last time when I said “what books should I teach?” and outsourced the question to the internet… Umm… “what books should I teach?”

The class has a few different purposes. On one hand, it’s sort of an intro to the literary history and evolution of comics in America (yes, the in America part is kind of important… if I had to cover the entire world of comics from other countries, this would take like a decade). It’s also an intro to gender theory stuff. And it’s a look at analysis of how sex and violence have been treated in comic books (superhero and otherwise) over the last 80 years or so.

So uh… what should I teach? I have some general ideas, but I’m curious as to what other people come up with. What books should I consider and why. In particular the few students who read this who were in the other class (Ayana, Brooklin, Dani, Elysse, anyone else who is watching and I just don’t know), I’d love to hear from you guys specifically since you’ll have insight into exactly what we did that no one else in the world does. Here’s your chance to give back. What would you like to see added? What did you hate reading and I should drop?

To everyone else, I’m just interested in your general opinions. What comic really belongs in a class like this? So uh…. go!