Mundos paralelos: o multiverso como máquina abstrata nos quadrinhos de super-heróis.

Abstract

The multiverse of superhero comics is a narrative and imagetic phenomenon unique in its vastness and complexity. Drawing on the work of Craft (2004), Kukkonen (2010), Proctor (2017) and Torrecilla (2025), among others, this thesis understands the multiverse as an arrangement of stories that replaces the idea of a linear timeline with a matrix of contradictory parallel worlds, alternative futures and possible scenarios that exist concurrently. The aim of this research is to dramatize the concept of the multiverse and understand which elements are needed in which configuration to produce it in the context of superhero comics. To do this, I use Deleuze and Guattari's (2011a, 2011b) assemblages as a methodological principle, mediated by Buchanan (2021). Throughout the work, I draw the lines of a diagram to understand the organization of desires in what I call the hero-assemblage. I identify a material dimension in the relationship between artists, fans and corporations (forms of content), and an expressive dimension in the serial form, Sheherazade's machine with its hooks and twists dedicated to extracting surplus value from the narrative (forms of expression), both of which have an abstract machine, the multiverse, as their principle of unity. Based on the relationship of presupposition between the two, I coined the term fiction mesh, inspired by Ingold (2015), to name the texture of stories, production logics and relationships along which artists create new stories, which are born from the plane of conditions of possibility (plane of consistency, Body without Organs, etc.). In this way, different worlds transform the superhero's refrain into movements of de-re-territorialization that disabituate the reader, while at the same time situating them in the familiar melody. Finally, I conclude that the abstract machine of the multiverse is not a structure, but an opening for speculation, efetuated by the plots that multiply and which, in turn, delimits the conditions of possibility of the multiplication itself. In addition, the work is, in part, an exercise in comics-based research (CBR) as defined by Kuttner et al (2020) that takes advantage of the affordances of the language to produce knowledge in the form of montage-comics created from different superhero comics.