The Metamodernist Epiphanies of Daytripper

The graphic novelnovel Daytripper, co-created by the Brazilian brothers Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, is examined as an example of a new, post-postmodern cultural logic, which the author calls Mass High Culture. The paper analyses Daytripper to showcase how, while returning to the characteristic forms and themes of high modernism, literary works of this kind mediate the demands of a neoliberal economy and have the capacity to revive/reanimate literary production in the twenty-first century. Its artistic success points to the fact that mass-market comics can position themselves as art-comics, and modernist aesthetics can be internalized into corporate modes of storytelling. More generally, the paper argues that works that are produced in the mode of Mass High Culture can transcend the seeming contradictions of the cultural field within which they operate.