Derrida, Deleuze and a Duck: The Movement of the Circulating Differential in Comic Book Analysis

The search for the ‘secrets between the panels’ in the ‘strange and wonderful’ medium of the comic book certainly evokes the appeal of a narrative adventure — a quest to find a hidden treasure in an unknown realm — but when comic book analysis is consumed by the search to locate a hidden ‘x’ that ‘marks the spot’ of a concealed presence in the medium, does the logocentric form the academic treasure hunt prevent the journey from being anything other than a linear quest progressing towards a concealed presence? In this article, the author applies Deleuze’s extra-structural object = x to the structuring of sense in comic book analysis; she submits this third thing to the ‘irreducible difference’ of Derridean and Deleuzian thought and proposes an alternate reading of the medium, one which attempts to avoid closure through an aporetic reading of the formal structure.