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166 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Sigrid Thomsen | Navigating Movement and Uncertainty Interiority and Fantastical Elements Glidden’s text is an autobiographical comic. As Wibke Weber and Hans-Martin Rall argue, “the roots of telling stories based on real events can be seen in the underground comics move- ment in the US between roughly 1967 and 1975” (Weber/Rall 2017: 381); it has since become a popular and prolific subgenre.13 The genre of graphic memoirs, and the medium of comics more generally, has its own ways of making a character’s interior life understandable to the reader. Along with the push and pull between words and images and the gap created by the gutter, comics can play with perspective and size or add fantastical elements. Along with the heightened expressions on Sarah’s face, Glidden shows the reader how Sarah is feeling by vary- ing Sarah’s size in the panel. This is particularly evident in a scene early on in the comic, when Sarah has to go through passport control in New York City before boarding her flight to Israel [cf. Fig. 3]. Here, Sarah’s shrinking in size is linked to a proliferation of speech bubbles. When Sarah first steps toward passport control, her face looms large in the panel and there is just one speech bubble coming from the border guard saying “Passport, please.” When the border guard then starts asking her questions, he and Sarah are the same size in the panel. As he continues ques- tioning her, she gets smaller in size while there is a growing barrage of speech bubbles. The bor- der guard’s insistent questions, and Sarah’s uncertain responses, successively crowd Sarah out of the panel. When the border guard asks Sarah about her bat mitzvah reception, an event she barely remembers, Sarah gets not only smaller, but younger; we see her as the blushing, insecure 13-year old she was at her bat mitzvah. This signals the way the border guard reduces Sarah and puts her in a powerless position not just through the relentlessness of his questions, but also through their content. In the last two panels, when the border guard finally relents, saying first “Mmm” and then “Okay. Thank you.”, Sarah is absent from the frame, but here, her absence reads not so much as being crowded out of the room, than as finally being freed from the guard’s gaze. In addition to this playing with size, perspective, and absence, Glidden uses several fantas- tical elements to depict Sarah navigating her inner and outer mobility. In two such instances, Glidden breaks Sarah up into different parts as part of a courtroom scene. In the first such scene, Sarah is on the Birthright tour bus when Gil gives an account of the peace process between Israel and Palestine [cf. Fig. 4]. After her initial skepticism toward Birthright, this is the first time Sarah thinks that Gil may be giving a relatively objective, broad-minded account, but is immediately unsettled by her own softening toward the program. When Gil is ready to take questions, there is one panel in which Sarah sits with a speech bubble, empty except for ellipses, floating over her head. The next panel functions as a kind of in-between step between Sarah’s physical state of being on the bus and her mental state of being in the courtroom. She is still dressed in her clothes from the bus but is moved slightly to the left of the center; a lectern pops up over her right arm, from which there emerges a speech bubble saying “Order! Order in this court!” (Glidden 2016: 27). While the text in the form of the speech bubble is thus part of the courtroom scene that is to follow, the image in the panel is in the process of dissolving into the next scene. The case that will be argued in Sarah’s internal court is whether “Birthright is trying to 13 As Hillary Chute writes, “the genre of comics nonfiction, especially by women, is resonating deeply with readers around the globe: it is intimate and political at the same time” (Chute 2011b: 176).