Many adults, even librarians who willingly add comics to their collections, often dismiss the importance of comics. Compared to reading "real" books, reading comics appears to be a simple task and compared to reading no books, reading comics might be preferable. After all, comics do have words, but the plentiful pictures seem to carry most of the meaning. Reading comics could never approach the complexity of reading "real" texts with their dense forests of words and winding arguments, right? Yet, in reality, reading comics--really reading comics--is a complex task. Reading any text successfully, including comics, requires more than decoding the words: readers must approach a text with an understanding of the relevant social, linguistic, and cultural conventions if reading is to lead to any meaningful knowledge or action. This brief article examines various definitions of the comic, explores the history of the comic in American life, describes how comics work structurally and linguistically to convey meaning, and explains why comics may be valued as texts. The article also observes how conventional books for young people are adopting some of the features used in comics, thus creating a hybrid format in the process. (Contains 6 resources.)