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Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 6 2o20 (Travel) Tanja Kapp | Journeying the Page 183 of Molesworth’s walk, but are also often allowed to speak for themselves, sketching a sense of atmosphere and place. Most of the photographs used in A Long Walk are arrayed in collages on three double pages. These are mirrored by collages of drawings distributed throughout the zine [see Fig. 6]. All of these double pages exhibit a number of smaller images that are separated by white in-between spaces. In relation to the rest of the work, these collage pages stand out due to their similarity in image size, number and arrangement. However, through this analogy their media-specific differences become even more apparent: While photography is commonly under- stood as being able to produce realistic ‘copies’ of the world, abstract drawings might rather be seen as less immediate renderings of an outside ‘reality’. When comparing the subjective experi- ences of both medial forms, the involvement of imagination seems especially heightened when it comes to the drawn pictures. These drawings thus suggest a degree of subjectivity in their mediation of the world, both account- ing for the perspective of the creator, as well as lending the reader the oppor- tunity to interpret them more freely than their photographed counterparts. Hence, juxtaposing photos within a narrative that is predominantly com- posed of abstract drawings highlights the medium-specific properties of each one of these pictorial sign systems. As a consequence, the zine makes apparent that abstraction requires the imaginative involvement of the reader, further inviting a subjective self-in- volvement with the geography of the page. Considering all pictorial and semiotic media used in A Long Walk, the reader must acknowledge that, with the exception of the photographs, which merely amount to approxi- mately 10% of the narrative, the zine is comprised of a huge number of drawings and occasional pages with written passages. As illustrated before, the style of the drawings focuses on shapes, contrast and textures, and thus affects the reader not via realistic details but through an overall feeling, an atmosphere, or a sense of place, all of which remain open for interpretation. Coming from the standpoint of comics analysis but concentrating on the study of word-image combi- nation, Scott McCloud argues that abstracted depiction, with its intentionally unclear signs or omitted details, requires the participation of an individual’s subjective reality to facilitate a read- ing of its unfolding. Building on a diagram by McCloud, Fig. 7 shows the level of abstraction inherent to pictorial and semiotic media and locates on this spectrum the specific instances of word and image used in the work at hand. McCloud further notes that ‘when pictures are more abstracted from “reality”, they require greater levels of perception, more like words’ (McCloud 1993: 49). This means that when encountering these abstract, cartoon-like shapes, the reader is engaging in a process called ‘closure’, in which they are ‘mentally completing that which is incomplete based on past experience’ (McCloud 1993: 63). The more abstracted a representa- tion becomes, the more freely is the recipient able to interpret what is depicted. The iconic, abstracted drawing style in A Long Walk thus creates a less ‘direct’ representation of the walk. Fig. 7: Map of the range of vocabulary in media combining word and image, specifying abstraction in A Long Walk [own figure based on the frame- work in McCloud 1993: 52–53] (Molesworth 2016)