Melville. Faulkner. Spider-Man.

The slow embrace of the comic-book medium by elite audiences is a history with its own particular milestones, each marking a moment of sudden approbation by previously disapproving constituencies. George McManus received a congressional dinner and warm words from Franklin D. Roosevelt in celebration of his comic strip, Mid-century-modern artists like Roy Lichtenstein adapted (okay, lifted) images and panels from comic books. Art Spiegelman received a special Pulitzer citation for his graphic novel , first published in book form in 1986. That same year, this magazine featured a story titled “”—an early entrant in a genre of journalism so pervasive, it’s sometimes known to fans by the acronym CAFKA (as in, “Comics aren’t for kids anymore”). Another Pulitzer, 2001’s fiction prize, went to Michael Chabon for which suggested, alongside books like Jonathan Lethem’s , that comics, particularly the branch of the medium dedicated to superheroics, were a useful basis for