Protagonismo constelar em Guerra civil: história, linguagem e multiplicidade nas HQ’s da Marvel

Abstract

Civil War (2006), the narrative arc chosen as the corpus of our research, is a work full of potential in terms of its secondary characters and how they act in favor of constructing political, social, and historical reflections. In this sense, we propose a reading of the secondary, supporting, and anonymous characters, based not on dichotomous aspects or those that cast the protagonist aside, but from another protagonism, which we defend as shared, fluid, and constellated, operating from manifestations including secondary roles in a space of transience and multiplicity, constituting a reading key that decentralizes the figure of a single protagonist as the axis of meaning production. Given the conceptualizations surrounding secondary characters, this thesis outlines discussions aimed at expanding these notions, which mostly treat them as less important in narrative construction. The plot, in turn, thematizes the historic day when iconic Marvel characters split into two major rival teams after an incident involving superheroes, which culminates in the establishment of policies that curtail their freedom in favor of civil security. As well as involving political, social, and narratological aspects, the configuration of the story, by hybridizing text and image, is plus significant, adding and demanding new forms of reading capable of expressing the importance not of one category or another, but the construction of meaning that takes place through the double verbal-visual articulation. Thus, the constitutive mobility of the secondary character manifests itself through a hybridism of languages, which find their power in multiplicity. In this approach to the Civil War, the dialogue with theoretical and critical readings that the work draws on is wide-ranging, but some theoretical notions and certain reading operators were fundamental and are recurrent: the constitutive debates on the relationship between comics and the market and the culture industry (Adorno; Horkheimer (1985); Benjamin (2019), Eco (2010)); the discussions of Deleuze and Guattari (1995, 1996, 1997) on the notions of rhizome, arboreal system, lines of flight and becoming; as well as the reflections of Ramos (2019), Cagnin (1975), Postema (2018), among others, regarding the languages of comics.