You are now entering the Jewish Currents archive.
New work from Sarah Glidden
Nicholas Jahr
May 4, 2011
by Nicholas Jahr
If you didn’t see it, the JC Cultcha & Funny Pages in our Winter 2010/11 issue featured an excerpt from Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (see what you’re missing?) Now Glidden has a new comic up on the web called The Waiting Room, about Iraqi refugees in Syria.
[caption id=“attachment_5224” align=“alignleft” width=“245”]
Sarah Glidden[/caption]
Glidden continues to develop as a cartoonist; after working on her book for two years, she described The Waiting Room as “stretching my legs after being on a 12 hour flight”, and it shows. I discovered Glidden’s work when I stumbled upon one of her b&w mini-comics, which if memory serves was more or less an early draft of one of the early chapters of How to Understand Israel (I gave my copy to Larry: Mistake!) Even in the graphic novel you can see her style evolve, going from symmetrical sequences within nine-panel pages to much looser arrangements in seven or eight panels in the book’s last two chapters (I didn’t read that shift as in service of an effect, though I could be wrong). Here she shrugs off the nine-panel grid entirely, and is clearly experimenting with new ways of synthesizing text and image (figures that stand between panels, a text box or two that function in the same way, another two pages that almost abandon borders entirely).
The best sequence comes right out the gate, as we meet Maraj, a young refugee who’s made the trek to a UNHCR center for rations. In the top panel Maraj is on the left, a line of refugees in the background leading off panel to the right; in the bottom row we get a much closer view of the line, leading to Maraj on the right. She’s actually set off in a panel of her own, and we can just glimpse another person on line behind her to the right. The layout alone conveys that she’s in for a long wait.
Glidden also dips into watercolor this time out, which lends her cartooning a flatter, more ‘abstract’ quality. One of the things I find impressive about Glidden’s style is her line, her ability to wring subtle emotion from minimal elements, and she’s able to retain that despite relying more heavily (or perhaps overtly) on color here. All the same, The Waiting Room is a bit more didactic than How to Understand Israel, and the impression of abstraction probably reinforces that aspect.
Gone, for the moment, is the whimsy with which Glidden approached her subject in How to Understand Israel; the ghosts, usually of the past and present on the page, that her characters struggle with. In that book she arguably gives her various interlocutors too much credit and herself too little (it only emerges very slowly, if at all, that Glidden’s engagement with Israel goes past a month of reading prior to a Birthright tour); here she seems more comfortable delving into the issues at hand without backing down.
I could ramble on a bit longer on that subject or speculate about Glidden’s influences (Rutu Modan? I assume the resemblance is only superficial, and that they’re both following in Herge and the Belgian/European tradition I’m less familiar with), but I’ll leave it at that. The Waiting Room is a comic of modest observations and small revelations, and worth your time.
[Via Comics Alliance.]
Sarah Glidden[/caption]
Glidden continues to develop as a cartoonist; after working on her book for two years, she described The Waiting Room as “stretching my legs after being on a 12 hour flight”, and it shows. I discovered Glidden’s work when I stumbled upon one of her b&w mini-comics, which if memory serves was more or less an early draft of one of the early chapters of How to Understand Israel (I gave my copy to Larry: Mistake!) Even in the graphic novel you can see her style evolve, going from symmetrical sequences within nine-panel pages to much looser arrangements in seven or eight panels in the book’s last two chapters (I didn’t read that shift as in service of an effect, though I could be wrong). Here she shrugs off the nine-panel grid entirely, and is clearly experimenting with new ways of synthesizing text and image (figures that stand between panels, a text box or two that function in the same way, another two pages that almost abandon borders entirely).
The best sequence comes right out the gate, as we meet Maraj, a young refugee who’s made the trek to a UNHCR center for rations. In the top panel Maraj is on the left, a line of refugees in the background leading off panel to the right; in the bottom row we get a much closer view of the line, leading to Maraj on the right. She’s actually set off in a panel of her own, and we can just glimpse another person on line behind her to the right. The layout alone conveys that she’s in for a long wait.
Glidden also dips into watercolor this time out, which lends her cartooning a flatter, more ‘abstract’ quality. One of the things I find impressive about Glidden’s style is her line, her ability to wring subtle emotion from minimal elements, and she’s able to retain that despite relying more heavily (or perhaps overtly) on color here. All the same, The Waiting Room is a bit more didactic than How to Understand Israel, and the impression of abstraction probably reinforces that aspect.
Gone, for the moment, is the whimsy with which Glidden approached her subject in How to Understand Israel; the ghosts, usually of the past and present on the page, that her characters struggle with. In that book she arguably gives her various interlocutors too much credit and herself too little (it only emerges very slowly, if at all, that Glidden’s engagement with Israel goes past a month of reading prior to a Birthright tour); here she seems more comfortable delving into the issues at hand without backing down.
I could ramble on a bit longer on that subject or speculate about Glidden’s influences (Rutu Modan? I assume the resemblance is only superficial, and that they’re both following in Herge and the Belgian/European tradition I’m less familiar with), but I’ll leave it at that. The Waiting Room is a comic of modest observations and small revelations, and worth your time.
[Via Comics Alliance.]
Nicholas Jahr is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn and a member of Jewish Currents’ editorial board. In the past he has written for the magazine about comics, film, the diaspora, Israeli elections, and Palestinian nonviolence. His work has appeared in the International New York Times, The Nation, City & State, and the Village Voice (RIP).
