Page - 162 - in >mcs_lab> - Mobile Culture Studies, Volume 2/2020

162 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sigrid Thomsen | Navigating Movement and Uncertainty she outlines the comic and the watercolor achieves several things. The subdued palette can be seen to create a kind of unified impression, as the different conflicting feelings and even media, including maps, are brought together by the overall unified look of the page. At the same time, however, and despite the lines remaining sharp, and the work not veering toward the abstract, the watercolors create a sense of fluidity, of motion, of liquidness, in a way that comics created with stark ballpoint pens, arguably, do not.11 Glidden is not carving anything into stone, but rather drawing even Sarah’s starkest moments in water, thereby keeping ambiguity alive. The watercolors are also linked to Glidden’s depiction of Sarah’s face. While Sacco, who many credit with creating and pioneering the form of comics journalism, overaccentuates cer- tain aspects of his face to the point of almost satirizing them, Glidden’s face functions as a blank canvas. This is due to her painting style, in which she uses clear black lines to draw the face and rudimentary facial features — eyes, a mouth, and a nose — but then washes over them with watercolors. I would argue that this is not, as comics practitioner and theorist Scott McCloud argues,12 due to comics enabling the reader to project themselves onto the character, though that may also play a role. Mostly, Sarah’s simple facial features function as a blank canvas for her own grappling with Israel, and for her journey from a strong, decisive stance on Israel to one of indecision and doubt. Although this is Glidden’s drawing style and therefore not limited to her depiction of Sarah, the way a face can serve as a blank canvas becomes especially clear in her drawing of her avatar, one example of which is on page 19 [cf. Fig. 2]. On this page, where Sarah is on the Birthright bus next to her friend Melissa, her face, every time it is depicted, and even though it consists only of some lines and dots, looks mark- edly different in each panel — she first turns the back of her head to us in order to look out at the landscape; she then looks quietly confused, almost disappointed, that “you just can’t see any signs of the troubles at all” (Glidden 2016: 19) when looking out at the nondescript land- scape outside the bus; she looks excited about the trip’s itinerary and then grim and displeased when she explains to her friend Melissa that “Arabic was here for a long time before Hebrew came back…” (Glidden 2016: 19). In the last row of panels on the page, Sarah first looks apol- ogetic about continually lecturing Melissa, then briefly neutral, and then smacks her forehead, laughing, when she remembers that this is Melissa’s first time abroad. This single page at the beginning of the comic thus functions as both a synecdoche and a prelude to that which comes later. It prefigures the heightened emotion and doubt that color her experience in Israel, and it’s a mini drama in which the larger conflict of Sarah’s trip is condensed. For Sarah, being in Israel is such a complicated experience that even ten minutes on a given bus ride can serve as a jumping-off point for feeling confused, apologetic, let down, and giddy, a rollercoaster ride of emotions that, while punctuated with her exclamations to Melissa, is mostly communicated to the reader through the images of Sarah’s facial expressions. 11 Art Spiegelman’s comic Maus about his father’s time in Auschwitz, which significantly changed the way comics as a medium was seen by the mainstream reading public, was drawn with a fountain pen (cf. NPR 2011). Joe Sacco, whose work includes Palestine (which was published serially from 1993 to 1995, and published as a col- lected volume in 2001) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), similarly draws his reportages in stark black lines. While these drawing materials are in no way less suited to depicting fraught, complicated situations and traumatic events, Glidden’s use of watercolor creates a fluidity specific to her work. 12 “When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face — you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon — you see yourself. […] The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled” (McCloud 1993: 36).