Today we examine the second Minus strip, found here.

This strip is short and succinct, yet it delivers a profound message: To the Postmodern, no subject–regardless of the traditional gravitas assigned to it–is sacred.

As the comic opens, it is clearly set in a graveyard. This immediately draws our attention to the theme of mortality that prevades the comic. The graveyard is a traditional, ordered, and formal representation of human mortality. Minus, like many of us, is first confronted with the issue of her own mortality by force, rather than choice:

Whether it be a family pet or a distant relative, like Minus, for most of us the issues of mortality are first raised by others. It is only then we consider our own mortality, a thought plainly seen on the shocked face of our protagonist in the next two panels.

The angel, here, is a sort of harbinger of Death. Each snowball hurled towards Minus is another weary warning. “Though it be not now, your death is a definite eventuality, young one,” the Angel of Death seems to say. The statue itself is reminiscent of 13th century grotesques, contemporary to their more well-known cousins, gargoyles, in medieval architecture. Grotesques were often used to represent humanity’s fear of the unknown. And so it seems a fitting representation, then, of our fear of Death: the Ultimate Unknown.

Minus’s reaction is shocking! Her return volley to the Angel a defiant protest against the traditional fear of one’s own mortality; a deliciously sacriligious protest, at that. She displays the typical postmodern contempt for Death, a defiance to shrink from it. In Minus’s playful spirituality, she shows an attitude increasingly common in postmodernism: humanity is no longer subject to the tyranny of the finiteness of physicality (a tyranny imposed by the Naturalism of the Modern world, I might add) but is free to explore the possibility of a life beyond death. Minus’s defiance seems to shout, “Death need not be seen as simply the end of my journey! It may just as soon be seen as the beginning of my next!”

Then enter new characters, an elderly couple that serve as the backdrop for Mr. Armand to make his grand and final point. At first, as is apparent in panels 12 and 13, Minus decides to feign solemnity for the sake of the by-passers who may not be prepared to engage in the Postmodern dialogue. This is of course a concession Postmodernism has often, in the past, had to make for the prominent figures of Modernity.

In panel 15, we see these Modern conventions of Solemnity deduct, incorrectly, Minus’s acquiescence to the commanding Formality of Death. Modern sensibilities demand a veneer of sanctity in the face of Death which this couple, mired in convention, clearly heed. Minus has already rebelled against this Modern play in private; however, she has found herself forced into her anticipated social role by these new observers. Bringing up, of course, the relevance of the Observer Effect: simply the act of observing an event changes the event.

Minus, in response to her own sudden–albeit undesired–part in the charade, decides to impress upon these confining and supposing embodiments of Convention her Postmodern sensibility. In Postmodernism, convention and tradition quickly lose all meaning. History and Social Norms hold no sway in Postmodernism where the Self is the only determinant of Truth. And so Minus displays this through the only means available to her, that even the typically heavily-weighted Conventions afforded to Death and mourning (as it is clear that these two are indeed genuine mourners) hold no sway over the irreverant Imagintion of Postmodernism.