[W]e should no longer naively expect that statements about a given epoch or complex of events in the past "correspond" to some preexistent body of "raw facts." For we should recognize that what constitutes the facts themselves is the problem that the historian, like the artist, has tried to solve

--Hayden White, "The Burden of History" (47)

"Repetition with a signal difference" (xxiv) is one way of understanding signifyin' as an African American figure of expression and, according to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the principle tropological framework for approaching African American cultural production. Although such definitions of the "black trope of tropes" (52) emphasize its roots in the acoustic sphere of communication, signifyin' also takes vivid, if less examined, shape in the visual field. Rich examples may be found in graphic novels by African Americans where narrative drawings combine with strategies for revising the boundaries between black and white, past and present, performance and history, and a range of other binary formulations central to the maintenance of Western culture. In a medium that presents inimitable possibilities for representing trauma through the expressive spatialization of time, graphic novels by Ho Che Anderson, Aaron McGruder, Kyle Baker, Lance Tooks, and others explicitly thematize what Hayden White locates as the burden of history within the particular registers of an African American context and milieu. Rather than reflect the putative facts of history from some transparent or bounded notion of a "black" perspective, these texts question institutions of recollection, such as documentary photography and Hollywood cinema, upon whose premises any such thing as the past is produced for scrutiny in the first place.

This essay examines revisionist historicity as expressed in Ho Che Anderson's critically-acclaimed multi-volume biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. titled King (2005). Anderson draws on, redraws, and draws over the visual archive of experiences that have come to be associated with black existence in the United States. King will play a central role in this essay, but I will also contextualize its aesthetic procedures by examining their operation in Lance Tooks's Narcissa (2002), an artsy melodrama of raceconsciousness, and later in the essay the slap-stick political spoof Birth of a Nation (2004), jointly created by Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin, and Kyle Baker. However disparate in style, subject, and sentiment, these visual narratives by black graphic novelists signify on and reconstitute the political past to intervene in the enduring legacies of slavery, minstrelsy, apartheid, and commodification that haunt the present.

Informed by historical structures of spectacle, the display of black bodies undergoes a process of media negotiation in graphic novels by black authors and writers. Lance Tooks's Narcissa provides a case in point. While the main story is about a young avant-garde black filmmaker who suddenly learns that she has only a few days to live and so sets off for Europe before completing a film project, there appears early on a set piece of racist Hollywood images against which the graphic novel establishes itself as a counter-narrative (fig. 1). (1) Diegetically we come to learn that these are the images that Narcissa, the title heroine, actively opposes in her own films, but their addition works non-diegetically as well, interrupting narrative coherence with a dream-like temporality that recontextualizes the graphic novel as a conscious revision of media constructions of black embodiment. Political resistance to institutional configurations of visibility link character and author, since Narcissa's status in the film industry is doubly minoritized (being both black and a woman); this marginalization is perhaps all too familiar to Tooks, a minority working in a predominantly white and male world of comics.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Such an intrusion of visual protocols of black misrepresentation re-signifies the theme and style of Narcissa. Clearly, these caricatures of black embodiment are demonstrably ex-situ in a work that more generally idealizes the black form through unexpected schemas of coloration. Backgrounds in graphic novels usually appear as shades of geometrical gray, but the normally dark parts of bodies throughout Narcissa glow with bright highlights. Narcissa's white dreadlocks, fingernails, and lips, for example, contrast with her monochromatic black skin. Tooks also exaggerates the curves of Narcissa's breasts and hips, casting the black female form in a fleshly, pin-up style that alludes to his acumen as a creator of graphic erotica. Indeed, an erotic gaze culminates in this book with a sexual encounter involving an impossibly muscled North African, taking up no less than sixteen pages of stylized nudity. Narcissa thus proposes an ideological perspective that ambivalently yet boldly luxuriates in the hypersexuality associated with racist attitudes regarding black femininity, while actively reversing stereotypes of black phenotype and character. This reversal would be less observable if the audacious interpolation of the repertoire of negative imagery was not present.

Narcisa's intrusive tableau of racist archetypes suspends the narrative's temporal unity and its melodramatic tone. Readers are presented with a spoof of Hollywood's racializing gaze from the perspective of an overbearing white producer named Simon. Although sparklingly white, Simon speaks in ebonics and, curiously, embodies the graphic novel's only unproblematic minstrel, sporting the same puffy white gloves that became a sartorial trace of minstrel lineage in characters such as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. In Narcissa's dream, Simon insists that his stereotypes replace the complex characters that she wants for her film Shadows Have I, whose title Simon impudently seeks to emend to none other than Getting Jiggy Wit It. Hence, the images shown delimit those replicable grotesques of black visibility permitted by a hegemonic image industry which Narcissa's Shadows Have I, like Tooks's Narcissa, sets out to self-consciously revise even while, perhaps unconsciously, being haunted by them.

Even so, the plot of Narcissa daringly recapitulates a few of these stereotypes. The opening pages, for instance, exhibit a scene of party guests made up of Narcissa's associates, hipsters and artists who in their similarly explicated desires and habits resist the narrow range of black identity that the specter of Simon comes to represent. Narcissa's friends, despite being neo-Caribbean existential aesthetes, conjure that specter well before it manifests in Figure 1. Less subtle in its negotiation of Hollywood stereotype is Tooks's characterization of Lily, the quaint elderly woman encountered during Narcissa's life-affirming jaunt to Spain. The Nanny, Magic-Negro, and Methuselah's Mama (from Figure 1) coalesce in Lily, who certainly nurtures Narcissa and evinces that brand of salubrious wisdom and simple charm typical of village ancestral figures in black urban fiction. (2) Indeed, Tooks overtly characterizes Lily as mystical when Narcissa describes her as one of those "divinely inspired messengers who appear to you at times in your life, solely for your benefit" (n. pag.). But regardless of these resemblances to institutionalized types, Lily resists absorption into Hollywood-perpetuated masks of blackness because of Narcissa's identification not just with her character but with the politics of her characterization: "Lily is every nightmare I ever imagined for myself ... old and fat and dotty with mysticism" (n. pag.). Like Ho Che Anderson, Tooks achieves a style of visual signifyin' not simply because he draws his characters within and against historical models of black representation, but, more importantly, because he draws attention to a struggle with mediation itself. Narcissa negotiates a particular burden encumbering black representation, which shuttles between two negative poles of visibility and hypervisibility, by first revealing the institutional frameworks circumscribing black embodiment and then by dramatizing Narcissa's efforts to arrogate control over them.

Springing to accept Simon's challenge to either get jiggy or else remain invisible, characters in works by black graphic novelists inhabit a world whose texts consistently reference the unseen, that zone of consciousness, particularity, and difference from stereotype which the visible world of the text masks or reveals only partially. For example, during one illuminating meditation on Simon's imperial take-over, Narcissa muses: "Mama used to say that the world's just like a table ... there's the part you can see and the part you can't. Those who master life are usually blessed with X-Ray vision." The language of the passage alludes to Superman as well as to commodity fetishism a la Marx's famous anecdote about the dancing table, which would get up and dance if granted the power of communication, for such is the mystical aura of self-possession that commodities seem to possess. Of course, Tooks need not be directly referencing Marx's Capital to suggest a similar critique about the pitfalls of fetishizing the visible. The comment on X-ray vision, however, is more arguably directed at the primarily white universe of superhero comics overshadowing all other comic genres which still mostly relegates persons of color to the peripheries. What Narcissa asks for, then, is a new kind of seeing, a second sight like the one Du Bois asserts in relation to double consciousness that is able to limn the occluded and the invisible.

Negotiated Vision in King

Ho Che Anderson's King undertakes this type of vision, which conjoins the seen and the unseen. The book-length edition of King fuses separate comic book issues originally spanning a decade's worth of work. Its salient features include images of documentary photography cleverly juxtaposed against vibrant illustrations (many of which are also obviously based on recognizable photographs). With its citational and expressionistic design, King simultaneously borrows from and disrupts photography's presumed optical truths and claims to objectivity. But rather than simply rival the historical photographs as records of historical truth, King proposes an alternative methodology that posits value based on a fundamental codependence between the archival images comprising King's life and the graphic novel's mechanics for recirculating, re-framing, and re-animating them. King not only recollects the photographic "facts" of King's life, it also lays bare the processes of public memory and hagiographic memorialization that constitute these images as facts at all. More than the sanctity of the life of King, it is rather the sanctity of photographic documentation and of the historical itself that this biography calls into question. For Anderson, in other words, artifact becomes artifice and a new kind of artifactuality is created through participatory and affective responses to the past.

The first two thirds of King demonstrate a noir style of chiaroscuro and high contrast lighting. Black shadows and intense white light swathe characters in an effulgent collision, positing a world equally torn between extremes of racial unrest and the indomitable promise of peace. Symbolizing the light, King and his words incarnate a purgative, penetrating force of non-violent co-existence as only a messianic figure can, especially when delivered to citizens in the form of a federal holiday and a speech whose political force has been reduced to a sound bite. Even as King amply indulges in an abbreviated and saccharine repository of pop-history on Martin Luther King, Jr., the graphic novel also revises the leader's iconic grandiosity, depicting it as more mythically Apollonian than Christian by tainting King with an all-too-human hamartia, a certain weakness for extramarital dalliances and a propensity for poring narcissistically over his own good press.

In later portions of the book, black-white antinomy gives way to color, as pastels, watercolor washes, and paintings help to acknowledge the iconic stature of the civil rights movement and its leader, whose transformation into savior is signaled cleverly in the dialogue bubbles. King's bubbles are tinted blue in these later passages, marking his speech as distinct from those of other characters the way some editions of the New Testament print the words of Jesus in red. This creates a sudden easiness in matching speakers with dialogue, whereas earlier textually-dense sections of the book tended to be more difficult in this respect. These earlier problems in identifying speakers result from Anderson's mercurial style and relative indifference to distinguishing between the features or dress of King and his confidant Ralph Abernathy. Adding to the confusion, speeches incorporate didactic and expositional paragraphs presumably taken from some of the same biographical sources that provide Anderson's photo repertoire--that pool of familiar historical snapshots of a country on display to itself and the world, during an era which saw the political tableaus as dramatic as riots and as quotidian as a city bus and the solemn visage of a black man who had a dream. Even in these colorful later sections, King adumbrates a photo archive that merges national history with a powerful micro-montage of black life, its faces, congregations, and intimate spaces, in ways both reverential and ambivalent.

As a result of its devotion to photographic historical materials, King becomes yet another test case in the curious place minority-authored texts occupy in by-now familiar debates over the status of history in postmodern literary production. In King, history is both a potentially positivist source of re-politicization, as Linda Hutcheon says of postmodern historiographic metafiction, as well as an empty sign of other signs, as Frederic Jameson has argued, signifying nothing beyond the recycled stereotypes and flattened units of pop history that equally comprise the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., as much as they do the voyeuristic spectacles of virulent racism seen in Hollywood racial melodramas from Mississippi Burning to Remember the Titans. By contrast King exemplifies without resolving both tendencies, perhaps, as Philip Brian Harper and others would argue, because it seeks to delimit an experience of imposed historical marginality, a consequence of oppression that models of postmodernism mitigate by universalizing and aestheticizing the very fragmentations which condition minority experience.

A further complicating factor in discussing this text's relation to history and literary paradigms is its medium as sequential art; King participates in a comics mode of spatializing time that presents its own unique relationship to history and has the capacity to represent temporality on multiple levels simultaneously. Though it is beyond the scope of this essay to detail them here, this process of drawing on history is also found in Narcissa, as we have seen, and in Birth of a Nation, written by Aaron McGruder and Reginald Hudlin and illustrated by Kyle Baker. These works sensationalize but also challenge national history via institutionalized forms of mediation such as Hollywood cinema and editorial cartooning.

A brief example from Birth of a Nation, about the secession of East St. Louis after a presidential scandal reminiscent of the 2000 election, confirms how the overwhelming disparity between optimistic national discourse and negative minority experience produces an existential disjuncture that is conducive to irony and an orientation toward history that embraces the ludic. To ensure the election of the humorously inept, Bush-like president Caldwell, corrupt voting officials falsely designate all of the predominantly black and poor East St. Louis residents as felons, thus disenfranchising them. When the residents begin to riot along with the book's hero (fig. 2, color inset), the morally upright mayor Fred Fredericks who eventually becomes the first black president of Blackland, the graphic novel adopts a method that highlights the verbal emptiness of political whitewashing from the brutal realities of black subjection.

There is more than the temporal dimension of the historic to consider here. There is also the medium and its exceptional capacity to spatialize time. We might, for example, read through the images in figure 2 from top left to right, moving down in our reading order to construe the story of the presidential address occurring simultaneously with but displaced from the arrest and imprisonment of the rioting citizens. The word-to-picture relationship in this reading enables the words to spill over from the space of the President to ring tragically and ironically against a nearly mute space of racist injustice. Yet this pictorial space is no less powerful, for its textual absences unmask the claims of the text as so much hypocrisy, a rhetorical logic of reversal typical of the comic strip. (3) However, a meta-level reading is also possible if we take the entire page to be a kind of super-panel, encompassing one continuously unfolding story happening at once and within the same meta-space. On this meta-level, the scene exudes a vertical division rather than a tiered and horizontal set of panel-to-panel relationships. Reading against the grain is, in fact, encouraged by the graphic novel's construction, as panels can be seen in their synchronic totality in relation to one another after a reader satisfies his or her urge to follow the story. And this page induces such radical re-reading, for there is no accompanying text other than the CLANG of the jail doors to ground the riot scene. As the space of the president through his words subsumes the space of the scene of its other, a spatio-temporal yoking occurs that makes it seem as though Caldwell were speaking directly to a disaffected Fred Fredericks in the final set of panels.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

After all, this is Caldwell's America, and his divisive use of the term "race" in his speech is both exclusively political--in reference to his race for the presidency--and political in an exclusionist sense as it tacitly espouses divisions of race. Similarly, his humble pledge to "serve" his America both is and is not an ironic endorsement of the euphemistic priorities of police action.

Despite unmasking the claims of the text, one half of the metapanel--the larger context of panel placement on a page--is defined by the vapid platitudes of power on public display, however speciously. Likewise, reading the page as a meta-panel is instructive for establishing the singular enactment in the graphic novel form of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope, which he describes as "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships" (84). Here we have two sorts of images fundamental to the history of race relations: the political speech as media event and the black protest and ensuing arrest or forcible suppression as another kind of media event. Although often construed in popular literature and film as having their own predictable properties of time and space, the two are made to speak to one another here, creating an unusual dialogue that reinforces but also whimsically shatters the boundaries separating them as antithetical media events in the public imaginary. Birth of a Nation therefore relies upon these boundaries in order to produce that quality of irreverent humor ubiquitous in editorial cartooning and so incisive in McGruder's strip The Boondocks, in which the ramifications of a discourse are potentially reified, at least partly, in the very act of calling them forth, if only to demolish them.

In a similar vein, King poses a concomitant set of questions. What does it mean to produce, compose, and read a "comics biography" about Martin Luther King, Jr.? And what is the meaning of this biography's doubled relation to a graphic novel tradition which, in North America at least, has been dominated by white male perspectives, while also serving as a fecund site for the dissemination of alternative and "underground" approaches to hegemonic institutions and grand historical narratives? Comparatively, how does this text treat history, baring and bearing its burdens, in ways similar to other graphic novels by African Americans?

In response to these questions, we might look again to the artwork of King as it relentlessly exposes dynamic transactions with a familiar image bank of Civil Rights documentary photography. In borrowing from this archive, Ho Che Anderson fundamentally asserts the fungibility of image repertoires, capitalizing on their semantic manipulability to augment the generic expectations of biography and the graphic novel form, which seamlessly makes a routine out of the juxtaposition of images and the multidimensionality of their meanings. Anderson's artistry bankrupts assumptions regarding photographic objectivity, the constitutive "pastness" of history, and the separation of copy from original.

Finding the Face of King

The notion that there exist no essential identities, but only technologies of the self, has become a critical commonplace in literary studies. Not so in American biography, and even less so in African American biography, if we accept Arnold Rampersad's corrective appeal to dislodge the prejudice against psychoanalytic and theoretically-informed approaches to biographies of black luminaries. (4) At least since the nineteenth century, a mission to unite narratives of nation with those of the individual has made biography a primary tool in the construction of American mythologies of success, optimism, and exceptionalism. These mythologies are, of course, conducive to the maintenance of asymmetries of race and class, which can tear enormous rents in the human dramas of American experiences. But while the material base of this mythology may be disrupted, the fantasy remains present in American culture.

And just such a fantasy enshrouds the myth of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose Golgotha-like death in Memphis in 1968 washed away the onerous burdens of slavery and segregation. Nor does Ho Che Anderson abandon messianic tropes when representing King through a visual framework that vibrantly recomposes pieces from a photographic archive that was already assembling the Civil Rights leader as an icon in the late 1960s, an icon who contrasted with the mass of African American bodies objectified by the press as allegorical figures of national exclusion. After all, newspaper photographs document not just public history, but also notions of visible and embodied citizenship. Selected for their ability to translate events for the greatest number of readers, newspaper photos document rules of visibility at a given time rather than any simple objective event. Especially during the Civil Rights era, such photographs documented marginalized bodies, capturing them in contexts of violence, protest, poverty, and general unrest. By pulling these images out of their original contexts and including them in a set of new contextual relations alongside those of Martin Luther King, Jr., Anderson invites a reading practice that relies upon a reordering of visual culture according to the non-linear aesthetics of collage and pastiche. In so doing, the visual structure of King opens critical space for contemplating the interrelation of public memory and private experience.

In King, experimentation with graphic style reveals the extent to which Civil Rights history has been visually codified and the ways in which the face of Martin Luther King, Jr., mediates our desire to read and see this history as iconography. The comic biography thus begins with a tentative refusal to illustrate the iconic face of its titular hero, building the reader's desire for a distinct vision of King. The cover design (fig. 3, color inset), for example, presents a mural-like array of metallic faces in ochre and blue tints, their angular forms exaggeratedly defined like stone slabs. Marchers appear anonymously in single-file to separate the two sets of faces. In the upper left corner a sun shines amid an orange landscape; the moon glows in the bottom right, where ominously bent and elongated street lights suggest the emotionless chill of a blue urban scene. While the six primary faces are differentiated, the largest bottom two provide prima facie interference for the viewer intent on identifying Martin Luther King, Jr., whose moustache and features seem present in both faces.

The creation of two readily separable worlds and two types of faces, some that smile in the orange utopia above and some that demur to urban blues below, contrasts against the immediate confusion of the singular hero normally associated with dreaming this transition from melancholy to mountaintop. Although allusions to the famous speech and marches are easy to discern, readers must question whether the face on the cover that stares back is King, or whether he is also indicated by the nearer profile with solemnly closed eyes and bowed head. If iconicity is predicated, in part, on singularity, then the iconic King eludes us on the cover. Something else, fluid and multiple, greets us there instead.

This refusal to disambiguate the face of King carries over into the initial pages of the story proper. After a silhouette of three black figures facing a radiantly white sun and a prologue of King as a boy shadowing his father before the elder pastor gives a sermon, we enter a world of "witnesses" who comment on King from multiple, often conflicting points of view. They are comprised entirely of static faces in high contrasts of white and black. As a series of austere snapshots taken in either a one-bulb interrogation room or a candle-lit confessional, the face of each witness is repeated without variation, accompanied by text in a dialogue box always positioned above the head and dissonantly belied by the careful omission of any visual cue that the witness is speaking at all. None of the mouths are opened and one woman even partially covers her closed mouth with fingers that catch the light starkly against an engulfing blackness--as do all the prominent facial features of the mainly black witnesses.

After these prefatory scenes, a shift to Boston University in 1952 promises finally to deliver the hero's iconic face. Instead, however, we get a series of images that partition the body and environs of King as he dresses. Threaded together by lyrics from Nat King Cole's song "Sweet Lorraine," these nine panels of King readying himself for the evening emphasize the parts we must suture to make the man--the cross, watch, necklace, shirt buttons, and shined shoes that together assemble the totality of an identity we are encouraged to compose for ourselves through a process unique to comics.

Scott McCloud refers to this process as closure, or the "grammar" of comics that requires readers to project onto juxtaposed images an illusion of both the passage of time and the coherent, uninterrupted enactment of events. In this panel, time's passing moves along the curves of the song lyrics flowing like foreground banners in arcs across close-ups of King's body parts. But rather than an attenuation of the whole, these panels moving from one non-individuating aspect to another create the sense of a wandering but perspicacious eye that is just as indifferent to seeing the exact time on the face of a watch as it is in revealing the face of the wearer. This reluctance to face King--to allow the reader to see his face--culminates in panels centering on the hero's back as he speaks to Corretta on the phone, followed by his immersion in absolute shadow as he arrives at the party. More than building suspense, these scenes suggest the way that facial iconicity depends upon absences which load the blank (and thus capacious) face of King with symbolic and referential significance as a synecdoche of Civil Rights. When that face is finally revealed, it is with some self-reflexive irony that King responds to a curvaceous white woman (fig. 5), who says "So you're Martin Luther King," with "I'm afraid so. I hope I'm not too big a disappointment" (17). The line has a doubled resonance. The first exists in that banal discourse of fete parlance when two associated strangers finally meet, their distance replaced with familiarity tinged with ceremony. It is thus from the unlikely perspective of the white woman of privilege that we as readers are introduced to King's face, a warmly smiling visage that exists on the comic page in tandem with a floating visual signifier--the text bubble which conveniently nominates him and attaches the iconic name to its iconic physical counterpart. How can we be disappointed with such knowledge given the book's earlier obfuscation? But the second resonance of the verbal exchange exists apart from the dimension of the verbal, in the visual patterning of King's smiling face which presents a more challenging task of "closure." Like the unvarying faces of the choric witnesses, King's suddenly revealed face at the party wears the same countenance in four different panels (16-17), terminating with the largest panel where he meets the woman who stands in for us. The fixed smile of the self-identifying King, so different from the scowl he wears a few pages later in response to overhearing a racist comment, implies that we may indeed be disappointed in having this visage mark the moment of our official introduction, since it is a mask reserved for trite mingling with white elites, rather than a face carrying the iconic authenticity that readers desire.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Masking redefines authentic iconicity, as the face meant to signify King is signified on as the public countenance of an African American moving through social zones of privilege and wealth. This face performs for a particular audience, and it is fashioned to deflect or absorb the unpredictable slights of a discriminating elite. But this is never the public we imagine ourselves to belong to when we look upon photographic portraits of King frozen in time with a sort of retrospective nostalgia. In Anderson's staging of King's debut our desire for transparent exposure precipitates the mask Anderson painstakingly shows him to wear. The viewer briefly perceives events through the eyes of the forbidding elite public. However, we are soon empowered to occupy an insider's role, sharing the contempt of King and Abernathy for the supercilious airs of a white intelligentsia woefully out of touch with the painful reality of segregation, a situation to which Anderson cleverly alludes with the book's first photographic reference.

Investments in Photography in King

The city bus becomes a site for both the political and suprapolitical--the affective or experiential--wound of segregation. Dramatically, Anderson presents the public archival image of the bus as well as the fictionalized private experience of King and Abernathy within it as a form of visual wounding. When it first appears (19), the grainy image of the bus, like a photocopy of a newspaper photo of a bus, is inserted in such a way as to float above the final panels registering King's distaste for the party of "white pseudo-liberals with their pet negroes." The effect of this placement wreaks havoc with the temporal-spatiality of the surrounding panels because it is superimposed over the "gutter," that white space in between panels that comics require to facilitate illusory advancements in time and motion. An inset image that rests on top of comic panels indicates a break in the flow of narrative time-space. When such inset images show small details of focal areas alluded to in the surrounding panels, a technique common throughout King, the effect is less arresting, constituting as it does a transition of amplification that helpfully directs the implied reading order of the panels. But here, the bus image is of an altogether different range of iconic abstraction from the surrounding images, having a pixilated texture resonant of photocopy and extending into the meta-panel gutter of the entire page's right margin. More of an "onset" than an inset, then, this bus momentarily cuts attention away to another dimension of representation, without, as yet, any diegetic pertinence to the story. This is the scene of history happening in King. While we recognize the photographic image instantly as a reference to the historic bus that spawns the movement, it functions within the unfolding present of the story as a blip of the surreal, a projection of the real onto the symbolic.

Once we turn the page (fig. 6), we abruptly enter the tense and quiet world of the bus, where we find King and Abernathy in the first wordless panel sitting at the back before rear windows looming like two white lenses to heighten the atmosphere of surveillance and racial dread. King's eyes, lower face, and torso merge with the inky shadows of the window framing, while Abernathy's face is obscured by an inset panel of an old white woman entering at the front.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

She exchanges pleasantries with the driver, spies King at the back, and hurls at him the only racial epithet that will do in such typological scenes of 1960s racism made famous in numerous Hollywood re-enactments. The embodied perspectives of the scene shuffle between the old woman and King in addition to the disembodied gaze of the camera-I (a term unsuited to capture the frequency and variation of its use in graphic texts). For example, the two shot close-up exchanges between woman and driver could not be from the perspective of the other two riders at the back, nor can the penultimate close-up of King be from the whites' point of view. This is a disembodied gaze with which the mechanics of the text ennobles us to inhabit bodilessly to great emotional effect. The one special scene of embodied seeing that is logically coincident with our identification with King happens at the bottom first and last panels of the page, where we see the woman facing us with enunciate cruelty. When she is seated her back faces us in a hazy silence loaded with hostility.

As a prototypical public space of contact and disciplining, the interior of the city bus requires that both black men adopt masks of insensitivity to their own humiliation. The implacable face of the contemned black man becomes a public persona that saves the appearance of the public itself, and in a way ensures the operative privilege of the white woman to perform her racist disgust for the black men with whom she begrudgingly shares the bus. The bus experience serves another complex function, conjuring the political space of black exclusion which the party purportedly disputes and revealing that which cannot be given over into symbolic release, that which exists partly outside of the public or political domain: black pain.

In Anderson's fugue-like rendering of the noir masses of white and black that build this scene, there is a palpable reality to the image of King's pain, even though the composition of the images focuses more on the inflexibility of King's repeated and silent image than on any change in it. The play of light here may be abstract but the forms that the light and shadow by turns swallow up and irradiate are tangibly realistic, such as the bus seat handrails or the woven texture of the old woman's shawl. Rather than these forms, it is the play of contrastive light upon them that is unreal, noir, exaggerated, perhaps even grotesque. In the final three panels of this familiar chronotope of the Jim Crow-era bus, a pattern of shot-reverse shot panels directs our gaze from the insult, to its target, back to its ultimate effect: the back of the old woman now comfortably ensconced in her first-row seat. The middle panel brings us close to the face of the dejected hero, for we crave a sense of his anguish here. That rage fuels the narrative's progress toward a multicultural era of history and the myth of a desegregated America, placating our anxieties in facing this time-space without a finger on the door to a supposedly happier present eventuated by this very moment. The reverse shot puts us behind the woman and just in front of the as-yet-to be crowned Civil Rights "king" who will usher in a world that eradicates racial privilege, so repugnant to us when overtly displayed but still easily dismissed when we hear statistics about the overwhelming predominance of certain racial populations in inner cities or prisons, or even spaces as mundane as cafeteria lunch tables. We usurp his perspective of the front of the bus seen from the back in a silent world awash with erasing light, awash with the promise of a coming enlightenment to cleanse such revolting signs of exclusion and privilege.

Nevertheless, paramount in any study of these panels' development is that signature rigidity of pose and repetition which Anderson deploys with skill. By simply repeating the features of King three times on the page while varying the lighting, posture, and size of the antagonistic woman five times, Anderson underscores the unvarying presentation of black immobility. Like the static and time-bound photographic images deployed throughout the book, the face of King here is a replicable image turned into an object-an object onto which we are invited to project our own emotions, fears, anxieties, and hopes.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. also finds such tensions present throughout African American literature; Gates sees this literature growing from the oral myths of the Signifying Monkey. Just as King vacillates between the private and public, showing the man symbolically in search of a public face to match his inspiring public voice, the Signifying Monkey takes up the figure of speaking, of densely structured oral discourse. King revises the formal tensions between the oral and the written form of narration--central to much African American literature--and replaces the search for a voice in writing with a search for a face in history. This exchange is achieved according to three primary structures of representation. First, there are the faces that come pre-packaged by documentary press photography. Anderson recirculates these with a deliberate care that ensures his audience will recognize them, like the photo inserted of King's delegates meeting with JFK and his staff during the march on Washington of 1963 (139). The addition of word bubbles in this photo panel, connected to an off-panel photographer pleading for the gentlemen to "say cheese," gives the scene a touch of wry humor while pointing again to the mechanical context of the photograph's production. This effect is reminiscent of Gates's discussion of signifyin' as a motivated structure of revision and repetition--with a signal difference. The signal here forces an awareness of the artifact in the act of being posed, tainting it with an artifice usually left out of our consideration of the truth claims of the historic photograph. In this way, Anderson corroborates bell hooks's contention about the special lure of photography, which "was more fascinating to masses of black folks than other forms of image making because it offered the possibility of immediate intervention, useful in the production of counterhegemonic representations even as it was also an instrument of pleasure" (60).

The second type of face represented in King are those fashioned after another context of repetition, not simply repeated from the existing historical archives, but illustrated, shadowy, expressionist versions of the face of King repeated with only subtle changes throughout a series of panels--as noted in the party or bus scenes. Finally, there is a third type of intervention in the archive of historical faces, familiar photos of Civil Rights that are inserted but doctored, such as a dramatically colored shot of the infamous scene of lynching in Marion, Indiana (33), or the police troops of Bull Connor opposing the Birmingham marches of 1963, their eyes touched up with an ominous glow (132). Or, there is the graphic novel's climactic representation of the "Dream" speech, which utilizes collage to create emotionally charged but paradoxical effects.

For the most part, the images of marchers, lonely black women at the back of buses, and presumed black auditors gathered before the speech, all provide a mosaic of hard-won experiences that give personal meaning to the speech without universalizing that meaning through collage. At the same time, these background photos transform from a soft monotone gray as the speech builds, becoming gently blurred behind the equally gray minister, to a harsher series of photo collages including lynchings, a Klan rally that blends into what appears to be an astronaut suit, which in turn blends into a photo of JFK. On the opposite page, we see different versions of King, one who has apparently found his public face in Anderson's painted world in three tones of opaque brown, not unlike a cartoon depiction, and another below it is as gray as a statue--his stony physique poised in a paradoxical sieg heil to the American Flag as he leads up to the finale of "Free at last! Free at last!" on the following page (fig. 4, color inset).

In King, expressionistic tactics of collage and illustration redraw expected boundaries between past and present, artifact and artifice. As a result of these negotiations, an aesthetic of race consciousness emerges that constitutes what I call "visual signifyin'." Though mainly laudatory in its reworking of the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., King casts doubt on the historical project of "race-consciousness raising," such as that espoused by the Black Arts Movement. While there remains an inherited post-Civil Rights skepticism of the textual object's--or in this case, the graphic novel's--commodity relation to power, King manifests a discernible ambivalence toward the photographic image, toward its exclusive legitimacy as the foundation for public memory and its potential for subversion or resistance.

In defining the heroic achievements of King, Michael Eric Dyson points to that quality of the hero which "enables ordinary people to make a critical difference in their social and personal existence by linking their lives to larger social goals and movements" (228). In a similar fashion, Anderson peppers his biography with photos of the leader that are both unvarnished and embellished to enable readers to recognize them as links to a larger social order, a national iconography that requires from us small acts of recognition, decipherment, and transformation. In the process, we may come to a new understanding of our relation to the historical record, recast not as monolithic or monologic but as dynamic, dialogic units of communication available for recombination and interpretation. If there is a structural homology in the works of Anderson, Tooks, and McGruder/Hudlin/Baker, it may be found in the ways each author seeks to confront and revise history, to discover or invent a usable history by repurposing inflexible items or images from an archive founded upon black exclusion and misrepresentation. As with Ho Che Anderson's manipulation of Civil Rights photography, these creators uproot and revise normally time-bound units of information in order to re-circulate them in new visual contexts, replanting them to have diegetic meaning in individuated lives specific to the story, but also to remind contemporary readers of events enshrined in the grainy repertoire of a past forever immanent in the present.

Works Cited

Anderson, Ho Che. King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Dyson, Michael Eric. Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988.

Harper, Phillip Brian. Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.

hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: New Press, 1995.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1989.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Kunzle, David. A History of the Comic Strip, Vol. 1. 1973. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper, 1993.

McGruder, Aaron, Reginald Hudlin (writers), and Kyle Baker (illustrator). Birth of a Nation: A Comic Novel. New York: Crown, 2004.

Morrison, Toni. "City Limits, Village Values: Concepts of the Neighborhood in Black Fiction." Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Ed. Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1981. 35-43.

Rampersad, Arnold. "Psychology and Afro-American Biography." Yale Review 78.1 (1988): 1-18.

Tooks, Lance. Narcissa: Graphic Novel. New York: Doubleday, 2002.

White, Hayden. "The Burden of History." Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. 1966. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. 27-50.

Michael A. Chaney

Dartmouth College

Notes

Credits and Permissions: Figure 1 from Lance Tooks's Narcissa, used by permission of the author. Figure 2 from Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin, and Kyle Baker's Birth of a Nation, used by permission of Random House; Figures 3, 4, 5, 6, from Ho Che Anderson's King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, used by permission of the author.

(1.) Perhaps because of its subtle mimicry of the film cell--its "wide-screen" format of two panels per page--Narcissa has no pagination.

(2.) For more on the village values of ancestral figures in African American literature, see Toni Morrison's "City Limits, Village Values."

(3.) For more on the way comics historically feature pictures which unmask the truth claims of words, see David Kunzle's History of the Comic Strip, Vol. 1.

(4.) See Rampersad's discussions in "Psychology and Afro-American Biography."