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Beginning with the pop art movement of the early 1960s, comics have been appropriated in the works of Roy Lichtenstein, Kenny Scharf, Art Spiegelman, and others. At about the same time, underground comics, aimed primarily at an adult audience, began to be published. Their controversial humor is directed at such diverse topics as sex, violence, politics, art, and music. Erotic comic strips found a place in some alternative publications; Robert Crumb's lewd, finely drawn strips, which have included the adventures of Fritz the Cat, his most famous character, attracted a limited but enthusiastic readership.
Meanwhile, the superhero genre, which first flourished in the mid-20th cent. in such characters as Superman, Captain Marvel, and Wonder Woman, was revived in later strips with, for instance, the surreal chiaroscuro of Steve Ditko's Spiderman and, further afield, in the multimedia antics of such characters as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Power Rangers. In addition, the 1960s and subsequent decades saw the international popularity of comic strip clubs and associations, whose members collect vintage strips, write critical studies about them, and publish the results of their research in specialized journals.
Book-length fiction in comic strip form has acquired a sizable adult readership in Japan, in the "novelas" of many Spanish-speaking countries, and in the wide variety of "graphic novels" popular in the United States at the end of the 20th cent. and the beginning of the 21st. Spiegelman's Maus, a strip about the Holocaust, originally appeared in the American Jewish press, where it generated controversy for its treatment of such a serious subject in comic strip form; Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize (1992) for the Maus books, which were published in the early 1990s.
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