When I was a journalist, as once upon a time I was, I would ask editors to be allowed to write about comics. Normally I’d be reprimanded, and told that I couldn’t write about Watchmen, or Maus, or Dark Knight, or Love and Rockets, because something had already been written about comics within the last year—it had recently been English comics character Desperate Dan’s fortieth birthday, and simply mentioning this had soaked up all the available newspaper column inches. I tried to explain that the action of acknowledging the existence of a book or a film didn’t preclude interviewing authors or directors in the future, and sometimes they’d let me write something about comics just to shut me up, and if they ran it it would run under the heading “Wham! Bam! Pow! Comics Are Growing Up!,” a headline that every editor around the globe was convinced was original and smart.

So in my utopia, if a journalist wanted to write about comics or comics creators, his or her editor would say, “Of course.”

I wanted to explain why people should know who Alan Moore and Art Spiegelman were, and who the Hernandez brothers and Frank Miller were and why people should care.

I wanted people to know who Will Eisner was.

I wanted to live in an alternate universe, in which the cool comics stories from the past, the ones I’d read about in the fanzines but would never have a hope of actually reading, stories by Jack Cole and Bernie Krigstein and Winsor McCay and George Herriman, in which those stories were in print, and available. A world in which lots of good, long comics stories were collected. A world in which libraries stocked graphic novels. A world in which girls read comics, and in which girls and women made comics.

I wanted a world in which collections of comics existed and were routinely sold in places that other things were sold. Like bookshops.

I wanted a world in which superheroes existed, and did just fine, but in which there was also room for any other kind of comic one could imagine.

And, frankly, we’re getting there. We may not have reached that glorious shining comic book utopia yet, but we’re getting there. Things are different. A world in which Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan can take the Guardian best first novel award is the kind of future I wanted. It’s an alternate universe . . .

I read reviews of a recent movie in which the complaint in most of the media seemed to be that the filmmakers had dumbed down a witty and intelligent comic. Now, this has happened scores of times over the years, and it is not unique. What was unique is that people had noticed—that the journalists writing the reviews knew. That’s the kind of future I wanted, when I started out.

We are, for good or ill, where we always wanted to be: just another medium. The bastard child of Art and Commerce has become, if not respectable, then at least no less respectable than any other.