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Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sigrid Thomsen | Navigating Movement and Uncertainty 157 touristic mobilities (Enrico Casarosa), and while these comics are widely read and studied, this does not happen under the banner of travel literature. There is, however, much that unites these two fields of inquiry. Steven D. Spalding traces the rise of scholarship on travel literature to the way it participates in the “move from canonical literary sources to both marginal and popular ones” (Spalding 2013: 200). Comics, of course, were seen as so popular as to be below academic consideration for a long time; this changed only with the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1980. There are other ways, however, in which comics about travel, and Glidden’s comic in particular, can be seen as relating to the field of travel writing. Spalding argues that, in travel literature, “a kind of mobility knowledge is produced […], a subjective shaping of perspective and perceptivity that endows the traveler with a distinct mode of knowledge generation” (Spal- ding 2016: 118). Comics, too, are a distinct mode of knowledge generation; as will become clear over the course of this paper, Glidden is able to use comics to generate a kind of knowledge which is open-ended and ambivalent as well as specific to the medium. In the afterword to their volume Mobility at Large: Globalization, Textuality and Innovative Travel Writing, Rune Graulund and Justin D. Edwards write that travel writing can “challeng[e] the unified sense of the self in motion” (Graulund/Edwards 2012: 199) and that “the genre allows writers […] to write the travelling subject as a possible site for active cultural and ideological struggle” (Graulund/Edwards 2012: 199). This is what comics does — it breaks up the unified self even through the structure of the panel — a mechanism that is heightened in Glidden’s comic when there are several Sarahs on the page. In addition, both forms are entangled in the mobile; while “the subject and the text are consistently in motion” in travel writing (Graulund/Edwards 2012: 201), I will argue that the same can be said for comics. Finally, in both forms, this sense of being in motion can extend to a mobility between different genres, as there are “fluid movements between non-fiction and fiction autobiography and memoir, history and the conventional travel narrative” (Graulund/Edwards 2012: 201). At the same time, however, travel literature and comics have to navigate different tensions. Whereas comics is3 frequently seen as a highly democratic medium, one which has been actively resistant to the status quo,4 travel literature “is a textual form that is caught up in the rhetoric of Empire” (Graulund/Edwards 2012: 3, drawing on Lisle and Spurr). Despite this, Graulund and Edwards argue that “a progressive politics of mobility” (Graulund/Edwards 2012: 4) is possible in travel literature. Whether Glidden’s comic succeeds on that count is open to debate, but bringing together comics and travel literature, with their often opposing investment in power structures, can contribute to a further unsettling of travel literature’s investment in Empire and its aftereffects. Comics and Mobility Studies In addition to travel literature, I want to bring comics into conversation with the field of Mobil- ity Studies, which emerged out of the social sciences in the early 2000’s, and which was shaped 3 The phrasing “comics is” here is in line with scholars such as Hillary Chute, who use the singular to denote comics as a medium. Throughout this paper, I use “comics” as a singular noun to indicate the medium, and as a plural noun when talking about different works within the medium. 4 One example of which is the underground comix published in the U.S. between the 1960’s and 1980’s by figures such as Robert Crumb. Comics have also, however, been used for propagandistic purposes (cf. Kerr 2016).