Holy Hypertexts! The Pose of Post-Modernity in Comics and Graphic Novels of the 1980s

This paper contends that the so-called 'post-modernity' of the comics Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, is in question. These texts, which were hugely influential on the superhero genre and Western comics as a whole when they appeared in the mid-1980s, have often been seen as post-modern because of their self-referentiality and self-conscious metafictionality. This paper argues that these texts were in part reacting against the already 'post-modern' conventions of the superhero genre, and in the well-worn traditions of this genre, critics used post-modernism as a mask to disguise their secret identity as rather formal, traditional narratives, cast adrift in an already subversive medium.