Andy Warhol's Campbells soup tins may be many people's first touch point of Pop Art, but Roy Lichtenstein's blown-up cartoon prints are some of the most recognisable images in 20th-century art history.

From his first foray into comic book style - a 1961 oil paint reworking of one of his children's picture books entitled Look Mickey, apparently inspired by a desire to prove to his young sons that he could indeed "paint" - Lichtenstein rapidly developed his industrially-inspired technique in a style that would do much to establish Pop Art as the dominant art movement of the 1960s.

Lichtenstein (1923-1997), whose lesser-known late work is explored in this new Artist Rooms exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, used his 'cartoon' style of graphical outline and reduced colour palette to simplify his subjects for instant impact. He worked meticulously, frequently painting his pictures upside down in order to make sure that he concentrated only on the line. Attention-grabbing, assured, fun, if any art from this period 'pops', it is Lichtenstein's. His boldly delineated world is life as cartoon strip. Gone are the nuances, only the pared-down drama of it all remains, exposing, at its best, the stereotypes and the crudities of contemporary culture.

Pop Art was a term first coined in the UK in the late 1950s by a group of artists and critics that included Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton. A rapidly developing international movement, it took the language of mass communication - from advertising to the bland generics of contemporary culture - and deconstructed it, often using or being inspired by modern technological processes.

This, particularly, was the case with American Pop Art, a far more homogenised 'movement' than its British counterpart. Roy Lichtenstein's adoption of the 'Benday Dot', a method of cheaply providing shade and colour, particularly in comic books, by the relative close-settedness of a series of coloured dots, became iconic. His subject matter too, culled from comic books and advertising, was 'cheap'. It was the idea of turning something so far from art into a formal painting that appealed to him, the artist once said.

Lichtenstein's best known works are those from his first emergence as a 'pop artist' in the 1960s; however, the artist, immensely prolific, continued to plough his own idiosyncratic furrow - always consummately designed and comic-book graphical to the last - until his death in 1997.

SNGMA Director Simon Groom and his curatorial team have built this exhibition around 16 large prints from the 1990s (recently placed on long term loan to Artist Rooms by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation) in which the artist, still working in Benday Dots, experimented with mirrors - mirroring those aforementioned societal crudities, perhaps - in a series of works that partially obscures its subject matter with dot-made 'reflections'.

This was a departure for Lichtenstein from the relatively straightforward comic book mock-ups of his earlier career - although the artist was nearly 40 when he had his first success with Look Mickey. If the bands of 'reflection' hide and reveal in turn, that subject matter still echoes the melodramatic and violent preoccupations of Lichtenstein's comic book youth, when he produced works such as Drowning Girl ("I don't care! I'd rather sink than call Brad for help!"). Indeed works shown here such as Reflections On Crash (1990) reuse or allude to imagery from his own back catalogue. Lichtenstein is nothing if not consistent, although that repetitiveness is often what splits the critics.

A nod to his early period - perhaps rather too slight a nod - is found in the gallery's own 1962 Lichtenstein, the sinister In The Car, hanging high on the wall in a room that also, neatly, contains a display case showing the comic strip that directly inspired it. Nearby, on loan from the Tate, hangs the metal sculpture Wall Explosion (1965), recognising the artist's war-inspired work that perhaps had its roots in his own experience as a draftsman and engineer in Europe during the Second World War.

In another room, a number of Lichtenstein's late nudes are displayed - bold, graphical, objectified comic book titillation that seems to parody the traditional art historical conventions of the nude. The trouble is, there's a hollowness too, an elusiveness born of these cartoon 'girls' trapped within the frame, rather like one of those dreams in which you find yourself standing in public with no clothes on.

Here, too, another seam of Lichtenstein's late work - his immaculately executed explorations into his own fascination with influential artists in the mirror-reflective Water Lilies series, inspired by Monet's oils of his garden at Giverny. Lichtenstein, ever thinking-out his subject, works on a large scale like Monet, the graphical lilies and bridge taken from the reflections in Monet's pond, laid over a mirrored surface which reflects the viewer.

Aptly enough, that obsession with mirrors was also born out in his own artistic processes. In a documentary film shown elsewhere in this exhibition, Lichtenstein recalls how he frequently views his paintings, as he works on them, in a mirror, to give himself distance from the work, "as if coming back to it two weeks later". Perhaps the same can be said of his late works, whose intention seems somewhat obscure. Unlike the immediate wham-bam impact of his 1960s love-and-war works, they may require a repeat visit.

Artist Rooms: Roy Lichtenstein, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Modern One, 75 Belford Road, Edinburgh (0131 624 6200, www.nationalgalleries.org) until January 10, daily 10am-5pm