Thanks to history’s hi-jinks, Alan Moore’s 1986 graphic novel Watchmen provides a preview of some opportunities, dilemmas, and reactionary temptations that surface when English-speaking white men cease to matter as much. But in a larger sense, it makes it possible to think about comics themselves--even a mainstream, non-underground (above ground? supra-terrianean?) genre like superhero comics--as what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe as a "minor literature."

In their view, this is something to be desired, a politically-charged escape from "mechanisms of capture" that limit one's possibilities in exchange for (pseudo) identities. One of these mechanisms would be targeted marketing. Since young people today (1), especially in the United States, are more targeted and by more sophisticated marketing than any group of people in history, the possibilities of "becoming-minor" may be one of the most valuable things comics like Watchmen have to offer them.

I should also note that I've been riding a Deleuze buzz for the past few months, and consequently this project will try to put several of his (and fellow traveler Guattari's) notions to various uses. For a nice introduction to Deleuze see John Rajchman's book, which also posits that Deleuze's humor "works to encourage 'uses' while frustrating 'applications,'" something I've tried to keep in mind with this project (118).

As I understand it, Deleuze does not lay out any systematic methodologies or ethics because these are always immanent in specific local conditions which are impossible to predict in advance. Hence there is no system of thought which transcends its local conditions and claims to be equally applicable in different circumstances. Notions are viable from one circumstance to another, but in different ways as different opportunities present themselves. Hence "uses" instead of "applications."

backward to the intro	to Watchmen Essay

 

Notes

Take me to the Bibliography

1. Those so inclined can start right off with the Millennials' Thread.

A brief introduction to Watchmen.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Dana Polan, Trans. Theory & History of Literature 30. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Moore, Alan. Watchmen. Dave Gibbons, Illustrator. John Higgins, Colorist. New York: Warner, 1987.

Rajchman, John. The Deleuze connections. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.