Here They Come to Save the Day - The New Sincerity in 1990s American Superhero Comics

Aug 25, 2026

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After the rise of postmodern superhero comics that dismantled heroism in late-20th-century U.S. culture, mid-1990s superhero narratives returned to openly heroic storytelling. This shift aligns with David Foster Wallace’s call for post-irony and with the emergence of New Sincerity, a post-postmodern approach against cynicism. The argument frames these comics as inherently nostalgic, reworking Silver Age tropes, characters, and storylines while clarifying tensions between postmodern critique and New Sincerity’s reconstruction of meaning.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages14

Reading Time35 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Putting the Superhero Back Together

Rejecting Postmodern Irony: The New Sincerity and Nostalgia

“Here They Come to Save the Day” – The New Sincerity in 1990s American Superhero Comics Rafael Alves Azevedo ABSTRACT: After the success of postmodern superhero comics that deconstructed heroism in postVietnam, post-Watergate USA, mid-1990s comics experienced a resurgence in unabashedly heroic narratives. This coincided with David Foster Wallace’s call for post-irony and the emergence of New Sincerity, a post-postmodern trend that aims to break with cynicism. I will argue that these superhero comics are inherently nostalgic, drawing on tropes, storylines, and characters from the Silver Age comics of the 1950s and 60s. Discussing this dispute between postmodern cynicism and New Sincerity, a lens through which the current political and cultural landscape can be analyzed and dissected, will shed light on the origin and nature of two opposing narrative trends that have been increasingly shaping American culture, society, and politics. KEYWORDS: New Sincerity; Nostalgia; Superhero comics; Post-irony; Post-postmodernism Introduction: Putting the Superhero Back Together Borrowing from the Greek concept of the Ages of Man, comic book fans, historians, and scholars use the notion of metallic ages to subdivide the history of American superhero comic books. The so-called Golden Age lasted from Superman’s first appearance in Action Comics \#1 (1938) to the late 1940s or early 1950s when the genre’s popularity waned and most superhero titles were cancelled. This period was marked by stories about antiestablishment “social crusading”(Tye 49) and World War II (Johnson 7-48) . In the wake of congressional hearings on the relationship between comic books and juvenile delinquency, the Comics Code Authority was set up in 1954 to censor the industry’s output. This led to the Silver Age with its focus on colorful characters, family-friendly and moralizing stories about outlandish science-fiction adventures, silly humor, and respect for established authority (Ibid. 69-85) . The Silver Age was followed by the Bronze Age in the early 1970s which returned to the Golden Age ideal of social relevancy, including stories about drug abuse, poverty, and racism (Ibid. 103-124) . In the mid-1980s, comic books like Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986-87) and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986) ushered in an era of postmodernist deconstruction of the superhero narrative. The hitherto clear-cut distinction between heroes and villains, belief in moral absolutes, and adherence to the Comics Code was replaced by moral relativism, mature content, and the introduction of artistic and literary innovations that favored ambiguity, such as collages, neo-expressionism, and self-referentiality. This ironic and cynical mode of addressing the concept of heroism dominated American mainstream comics 1 for approximately ten years (Johnson 125-165) . However, in the mid- 1990s, comic book creators like Kurt Busiek, Grant Morrison, and Alex Ross aimed toreconstruct a heroic narrative, combining nostalgia for the four-color Silver Age comics of their childhood with some of the artistic and literary innovations introduced by Moore, Miller, and Bill Sienkiewicz in the 1980s. Busiek sums up the central tension of 1990s American superhero comics between postmodern deconstruction and post-postmodern reconstruction in the introduction to his comic book series Astro City as follows: “We’ve been taking apart the superhero for ten years or more; it’s time to put it back together”(9) . According to Busiek, the superhero genre had come to be seen as a simplistic “crypto-fascist presentation of status-quo values” (Ibid. 7) that needed to be deconstructed to “show [superhero comics] for the unworkable Rube Goldberg machines they are” (Ibid. 9) . However, he argues that if they were able to act as a metaphor for the self-image of a nation in 1941, then they can be changed to fulfil the same function today. What the genre needs, according to Busiek, is not the f

FAQs

Why does the document argue these superhero comics are nostalgic?

It argues they draw on tropes, characters, and storylines from the Silver Age of the 1950s and 60s, even while incorporating artistic and literary innovations from the 1980s.

Aug 25, 2026

Upload by Noah