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>mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020
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Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sigrid Thomsen | Navigating Movement and Uncertainty 161 gutter can serve as a kind of corrective or counterbalance, as it punctures any fixity created and generates space for doubt and ambiguity. In doing so, it also creates space for humor, one exam- ple of which is on page 49, where Sarah imagines the Six-Day War of 1967 [cf. Fig. 1]. In the middle row of panels on the page, there is one on the left in which she says she is too drained to ask the guide Gil about the war; this thought is coupled with the image of a man punching one of his fellow soldiers. In the panel next to it, a helicopter and a tanker are bombing one another, while in the panel after that, tiny soldiers ride atop dinosaurs while fir- ing at one another. While these panels are meant to underline the fact that Sarah struggles to understand the reality of that war, each scenario is less likely than the one preceding it, with the dinosaurs being so far off the mark as to both be humorous and to unsettle any notions about what the war may have been like. Watercolors To this breaking up of fixity in comics, Glidden adds watercolors, which remain an unusual medium within comics; accordingly, not much work has been done on the use of watercolor in comics. In his study of David Small’s Stitches, however, Øyvind VĂ„gnes argues that Small’s use of watercolor “effectively describes a gradual loss of contours” (VĂ„gnes 2010: 306) and contrib- utes to the graphic memoir “involv[ing] its reader/spectator in the problematics of inexpressibil- ity” (VĂ„gnes 2010: 312). Ironically, in Mariana dos Pintos’ reading, the Portuguese painter Edu- ardo Batarda used watercolor to approximate the language of comics, since watercolors are “less prestigious” than other techniques (Pinto dos Santos 2016: 45). What ties dos Pintos’ analysis into mine is that in these paintings, “rigidity ends up being shattered by the interpretative fluidity that is allowed” (Pinto dos Santos 2016: 56), a fluidity to which the use of watercolor contributes. Although the use of watercolor is an understudied aspect of Glidden’s comic and of comics more generally, it is a salient feature of Glidden’s work. The contrast between the precise way Fig. 1: Sarah imagining the Six-Day War. Glidden 2016: 49
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>mcs_lab> Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020
The Journal
Title
>mcs_lab>
Subtitle
Mobile Culture Studies
Volume
2/2020
Editor
Karl Franzens University Graz
Location
Graz
Date
2020
Language
German, English
License
CC BY 4.0
Size
21.0 x 29.7 cm
Pages
270
Categories
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