Looking for help finding some variety in (clean) sequential art.

Boring7

So, I made some promises that I can probably keep, but I could keep them better with help. I have a teacher friend who is putting together a lesson plan (a month or two away still) which will involve comics. More specifically she will be teaching junior high students various things about composition, photoshop, editing, and photography which will include making a storyboard and sample cover for a comic.

My job that I foolishly volunteered for because I make bad decisions is to find a variety of comics that A: won't get parents in a tizzy over the sex&violence and B: are something that is popular with middle schoolers.

I realize this is a tall order since sex and violence is the favorite subject of your average JH comic-reader but I have some ideas. I just thought I should bounce that off people who read a lot more than I do, and see if I can add to the variety of art styles and comics I already know about.

Also, I'm planning on just getting the first trade/4-6 comics of any given series, since the sampling needs to be semi-reasonable in size.

AaronKI

Reed Gunther is a great Western/Comedy and has a cheap first trade. Even though it's "All Ages", it has appeal for teens and adults. (Edit: Well, probably appeals to teens. I could possibly see them passing it off as kiddy because of the art.)

Art Samples: 1, 2, 3, 4


Edit again: Oh! And Mouse Guard (Art Sample) Amazon has a preview with a few pages too, but none of the art I've found online really does it justice.

Munch

Bone; an epic, kid-friendly swords and sorcery story, which is available in one giant, convenient tome.

Gunnerkrigg Court; often compared to Harry Potter, it features two girls at a boarding school, where magic and sci-fi technology are commonplace. It's a webcomic, so you can read it online, before committing to buying any of the books.

The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck; middle-schoolers may be hesitant to read Scrooge McDuck comics, but if they can get past that, this is a pretty fantastic comic.

Usagi Yojimbo; a comic about a samurai rabbit, which is loaded with historical information.

Amulet; two kids journey into an underground world of danger and horror, to rescue their mother.

Polly and the Pirates; the daughter of the Pirate Queen, joins her mother's old crew, in order to recover her mother's hidden treasure.

Marvel Adventures; there's a full line of value-price Marvel Adventures books, featuring The Avengers, the Hulk, Spider-Man, and the Fantastic Four. All of them are filled with modern, stand-alone stories. Personally, I think the Avengers and Hulk ones are the best, but they're all pretty great.

Bone and Amulet are sold through Scholastic, so I can't imagine any parent objecting to those. Marvel Adventures are perfectly safe for kids, not featuring any death or sexual imagery. It's been a while since I read Polly and the Pirates, but I recall it being very PG. Usagi Yojimbo might skew a bit higher, as it often features characters being killed, but death of usually depicted by a character falling over, with their tongue hanging out.

Antimatter

Usagi Yojimbo does hint towards sex, at least in the earlier volumes I've read

the relationship between the main character and his childhood love, for example

jkylefulton

Any issue of John Byrne's FANTASTIC FOUR run

Any issue of Walt Simonson's THOR run

Centipede Damascus

Waid & Wierengo's Fantastic Four run was pretty family-friendly and had great art too.

TexiKen

A John Byrne series run, be it Fantastic Four, Superman, or X-Men, works well in showing a strong house style and panel layout that is universal. Busiek and Perez's Avengers run also does this, but that would be considered old school comics.

Any trade of Ultimate Spider-Man works in showing how a modern comic is told, in terms of lots of two page layouts, decompressed storytelling written for the trade, and more modern dialogue and the back and forth word balloons.

Scott Pilgrim, the first volume in particular, would work really well in showing story-boarding in terms of how they took things directly out of the comic and implemented them in the movie (which the kids probably saw). And as far as the first volume goes there's nothing bad that I can remember off the top of my head.

Caveman Paws

The recent Flash comics (New 52) have had some pretty good examples of how to use panels in amazing ways. Also fairly low key violence, no over the top sexy lady/guy bits.

RedDelicious