Page - 155 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

Navigating Movement and Uncertainty in Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less Sigrid Thomsen Abstract In her autobiographical comic How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, Sarah Glidden depicts her travels around Israel, which she undertook as part of a Birthright Israel trip funded for young Jews in the diaspora. Using watercolors to paint her comic, she depicts two kinds of mobility: firstly, Glidden portrays her own body, and those of others, traveling to and within Israel. Secondly, Glidden’s avatar Sarah moves from a place of certainty regarding the situation in Israel/Palestine to one of uncertainty, ambiguity, and doubt. In this paper, I focus on how the images and the text come together to show this doubled mobility, focusing on the panel structure (including the space of the gutter), the use of watercolors, and specific affordances of the medium of comics such as fantastical elements and playing with size. In carving out the way different mobilities are navigated and negotiated in this comic, I point out one instance in which the interplay between image and text can mediate an experience of travel that is at once open, processual, and highly site-specific. Keywords Glidden, graphic memoir, comics, autobiography, Israel, Birthright DOI 10.25364/08.6:2020.1.10 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 6 2020, 155–170 Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY 3.0