While comics have received widespread acceptance as a literary genre, instructors and scholars in Rhetoric and Composition have been slower to adopt comics, largely because of a lingering difficulty understanding how the characteristics of the form relate to our work in the classroom. Using as guides the "WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Writing," and the "NCTE Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies," this essay seeks to establish the conditions necessary for a pedagogically sound, functional use of comics in composition instruction, not only in readings and textbooks but also in practice.