Sarah Glidden is the remarkable cartoonist behind How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less–a book released today that documents her experiences on a Birthright Israel trip in 2007, as she grapples with history, culture shock, and the looming question of Palestine. (We previewed it here a couple of days ago.) She talked to us about the book, as well as her upcoming Kickstarter-funded trip to Turkey.
TECHLAND: Congratulations on funding your Kickstarter project, “Stumbling Towards Damascus.” How’d your plan to visit Turkey come about?
SARAH GLIDDEN: Well, I’ve been interested in journalism for a long time. It seems to be something that we almost take for granted, especially now that you can get so much of your news for free on the Internet. It’s easy sometimes to forget that there are real people behind every story, and not many of us know what it actually takes to get that story in the first place. So I’ve always been really interested in journalism (and in fact even wanted to be a photojournalist at one point), and I have always wanted to know a little more about the nuts and bolts of getting a story together.
(More on Techland: Exclusive Preview: How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less)
It so happens that I have some friends who formed an independent multimedia journalism collective at around the same time I started making comics. By the time I was working on the Israel book, they had gone from just three freelance journalists with a blog to a group of people who really knew what they were doing, were getting published by major news outlets, and were making progress in a field that was dying in print. As a friend, I want to know more about their process, but as someone who is just fascinated by journalism in general I thought that if I could “embed” myself with them on a reporting trip, I could look into how it all works. We have been talking about working together on something like this for a long time, and now the timing is finally working out for us to do it.
It’s interesting that you think of what you’re doing in How to Understand Israel as not journalism: it’s not necessarily the kind of journalism one sees in a daily newspaper, but it’s still observing stuff around you and trying to convey it accurately.
I’m not trained as a journalist, so I can’t say with confidence what defines journalism, but to me HTUII60DOL is more memoir than journalism. It’s just tipped way too far towards the subjective side of things, and I really tried, when writing and drawing the book, to be constantly reminding the reader of that subjectivity. Which is not to say that journalism isn’t subjective–I actually think that all journalism is necessarily at least slightly subjective. But a journalist is searching for answers, and writes about their findings. I think that on the trip to Israel that I created the book about, I was searching for answers too, but the book ended up being about that search itself, and less about what I found out.
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There are a bunch of sequences in the book, actually, where we as readers see things that we wouldn’t have seen if we’d been present–symbolic elements. What kinds of challenges did you have trying to show your perceptions in a drawn, nonfiction context?
One of the problems I came across was that there are a lot of scenes where I was taking in something that someone was telling me–a personal anecdote, or the narrative of some historical event. I think the impulse in comics is to just draw that event happening. But I’m kind of wary of approaching something that way, because I don’t actually know for sure what it looked like. I don’t know what people wore, what kinds of buildings were there, et cetera. And the truth is that, when you’re listening to someone tell a story, your brain doesn’t just start playing a movie in your head to accompany their words. Sometimes you imagine people and places, but sometimes you will just get a glimpse of an image, or maybe you’ll think about something else. Maybe you notice something on the ground while you’re listening, and that reminds you of a personal memory that now relates to this story in a new way. So I tried with “Israel” to find a way to express how I was thinking in comics form. There are times when I drew an event happening, but I wanted to find a way to make it clear to the reader that all of this is emanating from my brain. The whole book takes place inside that head space.
Are there other cartoonists (or non-cartoonists!) whose work affected the way you approached this stuff?
A lot of the cartoonists whose work I love tend to find interesting ways to represent their thoughts. I love how Gabrielle Bell blurs the line between “real life” and imagination. Sometimes you read her work and wonder whether this or that situation actually happened to her, or whether it was a dream or fantasy. But in the end, does it really matter? It was part of her experience of the world. Then there’s Kevin Huizenga, who uses form in comics to pick apart the way the mind works in a more universal way, how our thoughts fold back on themselves. Or what rumination would look like if you could diagram it. It’s not that I think my work is similar, but reading comics like that has shown me how perception can be something worth investigating with comics.
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The question of showing how the mind works is really interesting. You mentioned David Foster Wallace in your interview over at Kickstarter, and one thing I always liked about his nonfiction was that he grafted in stream-of-consciousness techniques from fiction to try to convey the way his own perception of things outside himself worked.
He called it “French curls and crazy circles.”
That is awesome.
You can just work yourself into a frenzy going back and forth about how you are experiencing something, then how someone is experiencing you as you are experiencing them…
One thing you share with both Gabrielle Bell and Kevin Huizenga, in this book anyway, is a really stripped-down, clear-line way of drawing people and their faces. Was that a design decision for this project, or do you think of it as something that’s more native to the way you draw?
That’s just the way I draw. Or at least, that’s the way I draw comics. I went to a very traditional art school, the kind where you draw from nude figure models for hours every day and learn to work in oils by painting realistic still lives of reflective objects and draped cloth. There was something so satisfying about drawing a crumpled-up paper bag so that the drawing looked real. Later, I started getting more expressionistic with my paintings, still working from life and having that realness underneath, but using lots of bold lines and painting with a palette knife instead of a brush. But when I started making comics, I couldn’t use bold marks like that any more to draw people. When you’re working from life, you have a thing in front of you, and all you have to do is copy what you see. It’s not really hard–it just takes practice. But making comics is so difficult, because you have to create this figure out of your own head. So I keep it simple. But I also have always really liked comics that are drawn in that clear-line style, starting with Tintin and Disney when I was a kid. I wanted to be a Disney animator, so I copied the Disney drawing style all the time.
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Yeah, I was noticing a lot of quiet Tintin things in the book–even the three-tier layout! How much reference drawing did you do on the 2007 trip, and how much did you have to reconstruct later?
I thought I was going to be doing a ton of sketching on site, so I brought this thick sketchbook with me. But that book ended up getting filled with notes instead! I was constantly writing, and there was no time for drawing, which is too bad. But I also took a ton of photos, so I used those for reference a lot. I really wanted to give the comic a sense of place, and to show people what the country looks like, so it was important to me to get the details right.
Are there things you feel like you can do with drawing to show people what something looks (or feels) like that you couldn’t do with, e.g., your reference photos? (This is a thing that always seems to come up with non-fiction comics: what can you gain by interpreting something in a non-fiction context?) Is there a sequence in the book that you can single out as something you’re particularly happy with as… non-fiction art, for lack of a better term?
Yeah, in the way that earlier I was talking about drawing things as they are experienced in your mind, rather than as they actually look. There’s one scene in the book where I’m thinking about how hard it is to imagine what a war looks like, and there are a few panels that show some of the ways I imagine it could be. The first panel is what you would reasonably expect to see: a soldier firing a gun while taking cover. But then, by the last panel in the sequence, I’ve let my mind wander into the ridiculous–imagining soldiers mounted on fire-breathing dinosaurs. Dinosaurs didn’t even breathe fire–it’s absurd! So this sequence isn’t about war, it’s about the limits of understanding something we have never experienced.