The Postmodern Turn of American Comic Books

The analyses also demonstrate how the most representative and widely accepted characteristics of postmodernism manifest themselves in The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and Maus. These works, comics, comic books or graphic novels, no matter how they are referred to, obviously meant the beginning of a new mainstream in America in the 1980s – which meant worldwide changes in the readership and publishing of comic books too, not to mention their academic acceptance. Today, new comic books follow the tradition of these revolutionary works: the artists have deconstructed almost every typical genre of comic books and reformulated their themes and motifs since 1986. These works are responsible for the disappearance of boundaries between different genres and styles; for the appearance of comic books on the shelves of bookshops; for the fusion of underground and mainstream; for the general acceptance of comic books by elite culture. They contributed to postmodern art, even the fact that this thesis could be born proves that we are living in a postmodern age. The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen and Maus reformed this field of art, created new forms and tendencies by reinventing and mixing the traditional, exhausted ones and laid down the foundations of the art form we know today as comic books.Mscamerikanisztik