Anarchic Strains in the Comics of Ronald Wimberly and Keith Knight

[...]race disrupts the political family or oikos in Agamben's tidy thesis on civil war. The haptic mode of venerative reception I read into these portraits comprises a field of union and relay in which the visual markers of the face become a blueprint or a space for the speech to inhabit. Because of the way the visual cuts into us and operates on our sense of touch, according to Benjamin, the haptic viewer literally manages the optical disjuncture of face and speech, manipulating them into something we might call voice. [...]Gerald Bruns defines the anarchic impulse of poetry in terms of a lack of origins and ends: "Interminability is one of the faces of anarchy, where anarchy is to be understood in its etymological sense as that which is on the hither side of beginning, the an-archē whence things begin only to begin again, and then again, without possibility of coming to a point" (159). [...]Wimberly's stasis or civil war manifests in incomprehensibility not just of the second speech bubble upon which all verbal logic hangs, but also of the second panel, of sequentiality itself. Next to her, Knight's "Blams" are towers of unmeaning, logos in the raw, and nearly as intimidating as the officer who interrogates the girl at the end with his unkind ontological pun. Because in order for her to do so, she would not only have to see murder as a joke but see herself as white as well—to become whiter and thus assume the role of her own indifferent oppressor.