Its appearance on the "high literary" stage has been long in coming and long fought-over, from a variety of spectra.  But comics – everywhere from the ten-cent-plague variety to the more recent explorations of the medium as a means of treating the more quotidian tragedies of the human condition – are no less literary for the "easy" expansiveness of the genre, for its weight on the visual and the inarticulable.  The progression of the medium, in less than a century, from one concerned primarily with tight-legginged superheroes to one with as many subdivisions and countercultural associations as it has is evidence of the medium's enormous artistic capacity.  Comics – and its wild breadth of alternative and dissociative terms is further evidence of this capacity; it is here intended to conjure all that has, variously and often controversially, been deemed to be, essentially, a comic: anything with a synchronously visual and literary thrust and which often has word balloons and panels – have typically been treated as in some sense lacking, both in intrinsic value and cultural importance.  Superhero comics are derided as a medium for immature adolescents; more mature graphic novels are often greeted with a kind of bewilderment, as if, in considering more consequential ideas, they should have to validate their continued use of a sophomoric form.  Comics are still, as they have been throughout entirety of their growth, in a state of progression, and, as more and more gain critical acceptance and they move further into the mainstream, a new slew of battles will ensue.  This all seems somewhat silly.  When the pretense around the word "literary" is removed, what is left is a tremendous variety of works that explore vast emotional and exegetic terrains; in this way, comics may even serve as an emblem for what is essentially literary.