This summer my girlfriend and I took the train from Chicago to Milwaukee to see “Masters of the American Comic,” an exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum. After wandering into the space yacht that is the new wing of the museum on Lake Michigan, we finally got to see the show we had long been anticipating.

We walked in to first encounter the illustration boards of “Little Nemo in Slumberland,”, reading the text and elegant lines of Winsor McCay’s imaginary world. There was certainly something beautiful about the pre-color layouts in simple black and white, which appeared in color in the Sunday New York Herald nearly a hundred years ago. But there was repulsion, too, when I had to acknowledge the racist stereotypes like the “Slumberland” imp or the “Kin-der-Kids” character Japansky, “the clockwork waterbaby.”

Nearby, a particular page of E.C. Segar’s “Thimble Theatre” that stars Popeye has Olive Oyl dressed as a man saying that she is courting herself. She subsequently gets pounded by the jealous Popeye, but not without discovering that he really loves her. In the newspaper, the strips were often next to Segar’s interactive projects like “How to Draw a Funny Face.” Or they were next to a picture of Olive Oyl with a strip of legs printed next to her that, when cut out and threaded through scissor-cut slits, would make her dance – animation on the printed page.

George Herriman’s “Krazy Kat” plays with the cat-and-mouse dichotomy, reversing roles so that Kat is in love with Ignatz, the mouse, and Ignatz is more or less in love with throwing bricks at Kat. Meanwhile, Pupp, the dog, tries his best to protect Kat from Ignatz’s fury. The slapstick slides across and down the pages like hilarious boulders, and reading the peculiar dialects of the animals only enhances the hilarity.

Art Spiegelman also takes on the cat-and-mouse clich‚ in his undeniable masterwork “Maus” – undeniable unless you feel comfortable challenging a Pulitzer Prize winner (and you might). Coming out of the alternative comics and comix scene, Spiegelman endeavored some 13 years to render his father’s story of the Holocaust with mice as Jews and cats as Nazis.

There is a lot of brilliance in the show. As a comic artist myself (What, you don’t read “Dragon and Goat”?), it was wonderful to get to see all the original drawings and old newspapers. I had no idea that Charles M. Schultz drew “Peanuts” on a board 6 inches by 27 inches, and I enjoyed seeing the oil painting to one of Chris Ware’s comics.

The old “Dick Tracy” comics are gems, and Will Eisner’s “The Spirit” reveals why he has such insight into the mechanics of sequential art. Jack Kirby’s original drawings were the bones that formed much of our modern-superhero mythologies, and R. Crumb never fails to give pleasure in the disgusting.

I am still forced to take issue with the central premise of the show – comics as art. We are in the 21st century, and proponents of comics still have to vie for positioning in the art world. I am one of these proponents.

The exhibition statement on the Hammer Museum’s Web site states, “This exhibition has been founded on the premise that comics are a bona fide cultural and aesthetic practice with its own history, protagonists and contribution to society, on par with music, film and the visual arts, but still in need of the kind of historical clarification that has been afforded those other genres.”

So are we supposed to take comics seriously now? It is a little odd that comics will now be creeping onto museum walls. Is it because the independent comix and anti-establishment word-picture gurus of the ’60s and ’70s are now approaching the age of retirement? Is the goal of the comic artist now to be on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art next to a Picasso instead of having his or her work pawed over countless times by a reader and carefully placed back into a perfect mylar case? I should hope not.

When we see a show about comics in a museum, we’re not seeing the real comics world. For instance, the show in Milwaukee predominantly gave wall space to original drawings that were created for print. These drawings were only steps to a final product, the comic, which was not prominently displayed in the exhibition. The actual final print was not given the same framing or treatment, subtly undermining that last print.

What lies beneath the Masters of the American Comic exhibition are layers that have yet to be mined. There is a glacier of work not included in this show by artists who are not male and who are not white. The comic is a medium that is underrepresented; and there are people within the medium who are even less represented.

Despite these contentions, I left the show very glad that I had attended. An attempt to establish a canon is what the comic world needs. Such canons can thus be debated, edited, flipped, branched and mutated until enough dialogue, serious and not serious, has emerged that we can all pause and say, “Yeah, comics must be art.”