Most of the commentary around the 12 cartoons avoids addressing or interpretating them as visual images with powerful effects. What we mostly have is political commentary concerned with violence and free speech. But images have a life of their own, especially tough ones:

Steve Bell, The cartoon furore

Michael Kimmelman writing in the New York Times is condsiders the cartoons as images. He says:

They're callous and feeble cartoons, cooked up as a provocation by a conservative newspaper exploiting the general Muslim prohibition on images of the Prophet Muhammad to score cheap points about freedom of expression. But drawings are drawings, so a question arises. Have any modern works of art provoked as much chaos and violence as the Danish caricatures that first ran in September in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten?

Educated secular Westerners reared on modernism, with its inclination toward abstraction, its gamesmanship and its knee-jerk baiting of traditional authority, can miss the real force behind certain visual images, particularly religious ones. Trained to see pictures formally, as designs or concepts, we can often overlook the way images may not just symbolize but actually "partake of what they represent," as the art historian David Freedberg has put it.That's certainly how many aggrieved Muslims perceived the cartoons.

Kimmelman continues:

What may be overlooked this time is a deep, abiding fact about visual art, its totemic power: the power of representation. This power transcends logic or aesthetics. Like words, it can cause genuine pain.