Walking Corpses & Conscious Plants: Possibilist Ecologies in ...

Bingham 65
with yourself? Not me. I had to set things right” (Figure 27-29). After we see Rick
accomplish this, the action flashes back to the prison. The focus is now on Hershel
Greene who is searching the dark corridors of the prison for his two youngest daughters,
Rachel and Susie (Figure 30). A full grid is dedicated to showing his unanswered calls
and shouts (Figure 31 & 32). Constructing a tone of panicked desperation, Tony Moore
shows us an enactment of the unthinkable or an example of pure horrorism. With Rick
absent, metaphorically law is absent as well and turmoil and chaos reign.
The first panel depicts Hershel witnessing its aftermath; his two twin girls have
been decapitated in the prison's barber shop (Figure 33). Though readers see the images
of Hershel's tear-filled eyes and the horrifically mutilated bodies of his daughters
simultaneously, the choice to indicate his sight as the means for discovery is important.
Firstly, it draws a tether between reality and vision. Even though Susie and Rachel were
murdered before their father found out, the echoing impact of this heinous crime is only
complete once its occurrence is known. Secondly, by implicating sight as an act within
the process of violence, our own security as readers is challenged. Cavarero argues that
our detachment from the image doesn't separate us from its affect. From this viewpoint
voyeurism “not only fails to cancel out reality; it does not prevent reality from
challenging us, making us responsible” (Cavarero 55). In a work composed of images
that contains hundreds of representations of distorted bodies, this large panel is
particularly upsetting. It is more meaningful than the gruesome depictions of random
walkers because it is emotionally charged; there is a history between the viewer, the
victims, and their father who bears witness. I envision this connection as a crossdimensional
pyramid-like projection: Hershel, Rachel, and Susie occupy points on the