Peanuts in the Gallery

The very first significant comics artist was Winsor McCay, who, just 100 years ago, published his first full-color page of Little Nemo in Slumberland. Here was a popular art at its onset and apogee: not a primitive Lascaux cave painting but a Sunday- supplement Hieronymus Bosch--a glorious otherworld of dreamscapes as phantasmagoric as they were funny. "He created a vocabulary for artistic creation in comics," Carlin says of McCay, "showing how they could achieve extraordinary, avant-garde things without undermining their popular appeal."

The coming generation of comics craftsmen needn't toil in the dark, nursing an inferiority complex or a grudge. "What comics are going through is like a civil rights movement," says Spiegelman. "This museum show will help." Like Hitchcock thrillers and rock 'n' roll, comics are obeying the tidal pull of pop culture. What was once forbidden is now mainstream; what was once junk is now classic.

So comics are art. Told you so, Mom.