omics don’t just tell stories—they break rules, cross lines, and make you squirm. They blur the lines between the "respectable" and the raunchy, the personal and the political, the real and the utterly surreal. ECL 157: Comics and History isn’t your average "read a comic and move on" class. It's about how comics challenge everything we think we know, distort reality, and sometimes make us question why we ever thought anything was sacred.

We’ll plunge deep into the trippy world of Psyche and the Psychedelic, exploring how the human mind has been depicted in literature, art, film, and the internet’s dark corners. The psychedelic experience isn’t some fleeting trend—it’s an ancient drug trip, kicking through the ages, showing us the darker, sexier, more twisted corners of consciousness.

From the gritty underground rebellion of Los Bros Hernandez, Robert Crumb, and Franz Kafka, to the satirical fire of Lalo Alcaraz, and the angst-ridden eroticism of Daniel Clowes, Zoe Thorogood, and Chelsea Cain, we’ll follow how America’s visual imagination has gone from innocent to downright provocative. Freud will be hovering, whispering about repressed desires, forbidden cravings, and the creatures that prowl in the shadows of our minds, keeping you up at night.

No comic book geek credentials necessary—just a thirst for the strange, the raw, and the daringly rebellious. This class isn’t about staying in your comfort zone; it’s about diving into the heat, the mess, and the revolution of illustrated desire.

Comic Books at the University

But why "Comic Books" or Comics (or Comix) now, in a lower division humanities general education class?

Sequential art (the fancy name for what we usually call comics, comix, or graphic novels) is our most contemporary version or manifestation of those remarkable cave paintings our ancestors scrawled onto cave walls, offering readers and viewers a visual text, sometimes accompanied with words, meant to be read and seen by the viewer. Our always evolving circus of a class will offer students from all majors and minors a brief study of comic books and visual cultural studies including graphic works from medieval manuscripts to cutting-edge 21st century video games.
 
As we wrestle with these outrageous graphic beasts, students will develop an appreciation of, and a language for, analyzing comics as an art form. But more than that, we will come to experience comics for all they are, including: 1]. the precursor for motion pictures back in the day; 2]. a revolutionary art form that put the revolution into cultural resistance back in the 1960s; and, 3]: perhaps most interestingly, a psychedelic medium, an evolving, even mesmerizing, medium that gives us the next, best incarnation of literature today.

This class presumes NO EXPERTISE in comic strips, comic books, literature, streaming media, or cinema; however, folks who dig these species of entertainment will leave the class pretty happy.

PASSPORT RULE 1 BOOKS_BOOKS_BOOKS

BUY THE BOOKS AND READ THEM--DON'T COME TO CLASS WITHOUT YOUR BOOK! Though we very much adore living in the 21st century, we will, for the most part use ANALOG, printed books in this class. So check out each one and buy them now! ... an added note, get your books sooner than later as you cannot always count on the Campus Bookstore to get you your books on time. Also, as I get this question each Fall, your books are available via the links above OR, easier, walk into the SDSU Campus Bookstore.

PASSPORT RULE 2 READ_READ_READ!

When you enter GMCS 333 for class you will have completed the reading that appears on the day-to-day class calendar, aka the Daily Lineup!  Please note the word "finished" (not "started," not "skimmed," not "glanced," and most decidedly NOT "I read the Cliffs/Sparks Notes and a review of the damned thing online!").

Coming to a university literature/film/cultural studies class without doing the reading is like a gardener trying to raise roses without getting her/his hands filthy with shit, a surgeon trying to operate without a scalpel, a fireman without her/his ax, a prostitute without ..., ... er, ... well, I better stop there -- you get the gist of it.

Do the readings! 

Do them twice if you can MAKE the time! I know, you are saying to yourself, "they don't make me read in my other classes" or some other sort of nonsense... well here, you must! Think twice about joining us if you have not finished the readings--the quality of our class depends upon your dedicated work and your relentless and independent curiosity. Without your periodic intellectual donations, the class is likely to evolve into a boring, even painful waste of time. 

PASSPORT RULE 3 PUT
THE MONSTERS TO SLEEP!

Your laptop will be asleep IN YOUR BAGS during class--or, better yet, resting in your dorm room or apartment.

Have you noticed how anytime a student uses a laptop in an auditorium there is a "cone of distraction" alongside and behind the student using a computer?

This is usually due to said student surfing the web via wi-fi perusing erotic delights or god knows what.

I was recently at a cool (ok, it was slightly boring, I confess) lecture by a noted writer--as I tried to listen to her, in front of me, a diverted student (attending the lecture, no doubt, for extra-credit) was perusing sites like these (nsfw or school).

So, laptops are GREAT for entering your notes AFTER class, but they will not be allowed in our lecture hall. If you have an issue with this, schedule a meeting with me during office hours to chat the first week of class.

Your beloved magnificent iPhone, your cherished Android, your fetishized Pixel, or even your primordial pager will be off, off, OFF during class meetings; if for some reason you are expecting an emergency call, set it on VIBRATE (for privacy, pleasure, or both!) and sit in the back near an exit after letting me know in advance before class that you are expecting an emergency phone-call.

Cellphones KILL collective spaces of learning with their ill-timed, annoying clattering rings, bongs, squeaks, chirps, and themes.

Yes, the trauma of that delayed text, yes, the horror of that missed hook-up call, yes, the loss of the buzz of that random Tinder swipe will no doubt doom you to years and years on an psychoanalyst's couch, but we, the rest of us, will gain some silence, a kind of sanctuary without which ideas wither on the vine. We are NOT joking about this unthinkable edict! Don't end up like this former student from another Engl 157 I taught back in the day:

PASSPORT RULE 5 Charlie-Delta_Thief

PLAGIARISM is for cads, thieves, and idiots who desire an "F" for the class. Plagiarism comes from the Latin word, "plagiarius" which means kidnapper, plunderer, or (get this!) thief--not a GOOD thing.

In the university, plagiarism refers to the art and crime of presenting other people's work under your own signature, aka cutting and pasting copied crap from Wikipedia--definitely a BAD thing. While your professor is forbidden by CSU/SDSU code from tattooing the word LOSER on the foreheads of guilty students, he can promise that felonious students will be remanded to the state-authorized SDSU executioners.  Read THIS as well--SDSU is SERIOUS about this shit, so don't take any chances!  Rely on your own singular mind and imagination!

Major Course Requirements

GRADING INFORMATION

• 40%  Attendance, Quizzes, In-class "Panic-Inducing Challenges", In-class participation, In-class writing, cineTREKS, Office Hour visits, etc.--note that "in-class" means "in-class" that is you can expect assignments to magically appear without warning.
  
• 30%  Your Mid-Term, aka the Mid-Semester Eyegasm Challenge
  
• 30%  Final Examination, aka the Final Eyegasm Challenge
  

QUIZZES & ATTENDANCE

Coming to class for each seminar session is NOT optional--the whole point of this class is to work together, the idea being that we creatively and magicly convert our classroom into a chaotic, unpredictable, and exciting intellectual laboratory.

Missing class, you miss, as well, the whole point of the adventure. 

So please bypass no more than three classes during the semester--you are responsible for any work/notes you miss when you are absent and can PRESUME that what you missed that day was important! If you miss MORE than three classes during the term and your grade will decay in an ugly way. EXAMPLES: your hard-earned A- will morph into a B-; your "gentleman's C" will appear on the webportal as a "D," etc. etc. Ditching this class too often will be as fun as a case of flesh-eating virus.

During the semester, you can expect several In-class Panic-Inducing Challenges otherwise known as CHECK-YOU-DID-THE-READING QUIZZES. You can expect these miserable quizzes from time to time, the number of quizzes depending on how many of you are nostalgic for high school. In other words, if everyone acts like a talented university student, we will enjoy FEW if any quizzes during our semester.

DIGITAL/VIRTUAL CONTRIBUTIONS (Voluntary NOT Mandatory)

Our main social media site for this class, Facebook-based, is located here. If you are a member of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s mad virus-like experiment in digitized narcissim, then you are expected to post class-related links, images, videos, articles, etc at least ONCE a month or 5 total for the whole semester. If you have not bought into Zuckerberg’s mad experiment and stay away from Facebook like the plague, you have a second choice--you can directly submit a posting to the #sdrc25 tumblr page.

You can also contribute via our own hashtag#, which goes by the catchy designation #sdsusdrc25. If Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram remain alien to your consciousness, you can send your suggested links/images/videos to me via email to bnericci@sdsu.edu; I don’t promise that I will post ALL of your materials but I will try, however, to see that some of them make their way to the fabulous internets. 

What are you expected to share via social media? Things you run across that relate to our class readings and discussions--you do not HAVE TO WRITE a long essay with your postings... a couple of pointed, pithy, well-crafted sentences will do, enough to give me and your classmates a sense of a connection to ideas developed during the semester in our class.

There will be both a Mid-Term SexDrugsRockComix Challenge, a Mid-Semester test administered on a date to be announced AND a Final SexDrugsRockComix Challenge (aka, the FINAL EXAM) on the last regularly scheduled day of class: to be announced.  Your final is absolutely comprehensive; it assumes you have read all the books and screened all the movies that are part of our required work. If you do the work, the final is a breeze--even "fun" if you can believe it.

OFFICE HOURS

My Office Hours are Tuesdays, right after class from 12:30pm to 3pm or so. My office is located in Arts and Letters 273. Never heard of Office Hours? No worries, there is a cure!

And why visit me during 'office hours'? Why not? You won't regret it (if only to experience the madness of my working studio space)!  You are warmly invited to visit me in office hours at least once during the semester if you can. Here's a primer on office hours from Cornell University, where your professor did time back in the Jurassic period!

At SDSU, it's easy to fall through the cracks, to feel that you are nothing but a Red ID# or some warm pile of sentient flesh filling a seat. In order to convince you that the Professor teaching you is occasionally human, please make a point during the semester to take the time to introduce yourself whether it be by piping up in class, zapping me an email, or posting on one of our social media channels.

Regardless of how we end up arranging things, if you find my posted office hours are inconvenient, do not hesitate to email me for a phone or zoom appointment either at bnericci@sdsu.edu

It's an amazing day in the life for #sdsusdrc25 as we welcome MAG GABBERT into our shared confines in GMCS 333, aka, the lair of sex, drugs, rock, and comix.

Today's visitor is a poet, not a comic book artist, but as I argued last Thursday, when we started out discussion of her terrific book, SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS: poems, poetry unfolds like a lot of comics: short, sweet, to the point, and, in Mag's case, ferocious and intimate, jarring and evocative.

More on Mag!

Dr. Mag Gabbert is the 2024–2026 Poet Laureate of Dallas, a writer whose work insists on desire, fracture, and survival in a world that often forgets to breathe. She holds degrees from Trinity University, UC Riverside, and a PhD in English with a focus on creative writing from Texas Tech. Her debut collection, Sex Depression Animals (Mad Creek Books, 2023), won the Charles B. Wheeler Prize and announced a voice at once intimate and unflinching. Gabbert is also the author of the chapbooks The Breakup and Minml Poems, and her poems and essays appear in The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Missouri Review, Guernica, and elsewhere.

Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, a 92NY Discovery Award, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, Idyllwild Arts, and Poetry at Round Top. At Southern Methodist University, where she teaches creative writing, Gabbert cultivates voices that refuse silence. As Poet Laureate, she brings poetry to public life—installing it in the everyday the way Baldwin once said truth installs itself: suddenly, urgently, and with no way back. For more, visit maggabbert.com

Thursday, September 25, 2025


The facts about COMMON SIDE EFFECTS are easy to find. I lifted this off of Wikipedia:

Common Side Effects is an American adult animated television series created by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block with availability on HBO Max.

The pilot episode premiered privately at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June 2024, and publicly a month later at Adult Swim's San Diego Comic-Con panel in July 2024.^[2][3][4]

But Bennett and Hely have actually done something ultra-extraordinary, as they weave a tale that is one part government spy drama (think STRANGER THINGS, with trippy psychedelics), one part environmental expose, and one part hilarious and vicious satire. In class, we will watch the first two episodes (as long as HBO does not block the feed) and discuss what Bennett and Hely and their team are up to with this dramedy. One thing we want to ponder: what is the relationship between animated motion pictures and comix!?

MANEATERS aut

Chelsea Cain is trouble—the good kind. She’s the mind
behind Man-Eaters, the comic that asks: what if puberty didn’t just make you awkward… what if it made you dangerous? In Cain’s world, menstruation isn’t a monthly inconvenience—it’s the trigger that can turn girls into ferocious wildcats. Society’s response? Control them. Medicate them. Fear them. Sound familiar?

That’s the genius of Cain: she takes something ordinary, something hidden in plain sight, and twists it until you see the absurdity—and the horror—of how the world reacts to women’s bodies. Man-Eaters doesn’t play by the rules of traditional comics. Its pages spill over with fake ads for “feminine hygiene products,” government pamphlets, and news reports, all part of the dark joke: the system would rather invent endless ways to suppress women than face its own fear of them.

The result is satire sharp enough to draw blood and funny enough to keep you turning the page, even as it stings. Cain makes horror out of patriarchy and comedy out of bureaucracy, and in the end she leaves you asking: who’s really the monster here?

Chelsea Cain doesn’t just tell stories—she detonates them. Man-Eaters proves that comics can be a weapon, a warning, and a wild ride all at once.

Jaime Hernandez
Read "How to Kill a             by Isabel Ruebens"

• pp217-227, short pieces by Sobel and an annoying professor you know...

• pp 236-242, brief interview with Jaime Hernandez, with Fede Aldama

• pp 248-256,  brief interview with Gilbert Hernandez, with Fede Aldama