Graphic novel Critical Essay | Graphic Narratives

Critical Essay by Russell Schechter

SOURCE: "Kat and Maus," in Communication Research, Vol. 16, No. 4, August, 1989, pp. 552-62.

[In the excerpt below, Schechter contends that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's graphic novel Watchmen and Art Spiegelman's Maus are postmodern works that validate the comic form.]

Criticism of the postmodernist enterprise as ultimately empty might well be a tendential parochialism. If one is going to live by the argument that modern works have an aura that is extant but different from that of traditional works, one must accept the possibility of a distinctive postmodern aura resulting from recombinant pastiche and possibly different from both traditional and modern forms. Watchmen, the recent postmodern comic book by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1987), provides ample evidence for the argument. Although comic books began as compilations of newspaper strips, the two forms quickly developed in their own—though closely related—directions. Watchmen, designed for a late-teen and adult readership,...
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