In this article I discuss the impact of self-awareness and metacritical tendencies within
the texts of popular culture on the development of genres in the politypical chain. Preliminary
analysis proposed in the second part of this paper concerns the contemporary comics — which
represent the blurring of boundaries between ―high‖ and ―low‖ culture. As the subject of
research in this brief study I chose Moore‘s graphic novel Watchmen, which exemplifies the
evolutionary changes associated with a metacritical attitude introduced in a schematic area of
American superhero graphic stories
