Difference, Repetition and the Superhero Comic

Abstract

Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1964) offers a rich and complex critique of the philosophical traditions of representational thinking and an effort to create an ontology rooted in the notion difference. This chapter approaches Deleuze’s work as a ‘conceptual tool-box’ and adopts several of the concepts offered up to re-examine a few of the recurring questions in the study of comics, and the superhero comic in particular. Scaling upwards from the level of ontology, the chapter considers how the ideas of difference and repetition come into play when considering the medium itself, the question of continuity and multiple iterations of the superhero and the fictional universes of excess in which superhero narratives take place. Troubling the very notion of searching for the ‘origin of the superhero’ (or, indeed, the original or ideal comic book itself), this chapter argues that each figuration of the superhero should be considered as a differential repetition, always the same but always different. The genre itself enacts a process of excessive repetition. Excess is therefore implicit in the meta-narrative of superhero texts, and particularly in the increasing complexity of superhero continuity from the Silver Age onwards. This chapter will also link this concept to the ways in which readers and texts form a ‘reading-assemblage’, and what new becomings are enabled by these configurations.