Sarah Glidden and the Art of War
Hi! My name’s Athena Naylor, and I’m a cartoonist and recent graduate of the George Washington University currently living in D.C. I’m excited to share some of my favorite cartoonists on the blog this week!
My initial reason for noticing Sarah Glidden is a bit superficial—she uses watercolors for her comics, and watercolor is also often my medium of choice. And it’s one I don’t see cartoonists often committing to.
But after this first cursory impression, I became invested in Sarah Glidden’s work because of how it approaches journalism and tries to inform readers on current events in approachable and transparent ways.
“Transparent” is a bit of a loaded term. When I write “transparent” here, I mean to say that Glidden is direct in revealing the inherent subjectivity of her reportage comics. She forefronts the difficulties journalists (and she herself) encounter with ethics, and relates these issues to the way we try to construct any story. Our perspective is always going to skew things, no matter how much we try to remain impartial. This complicated balance between telling an engaging story and retaining objective truth lies at the core of her acclaimed book “Rolling Blackouts.”
In “Rolling Blackouts,” Glidden follows two American journalists as they travel to Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. She documents her journalist friends as they interview refugees, officials, and as they try to crack a story about an American friend who fought in Iraq but refuses to be forthcoming with all aspects of his experience. Throughout the book, Glidden emphasizes how human experience imparts new perspectives on macro political events, and how her own limited understanding can only illustrate a very small piece of a very complicated puzzle. In a time where journalism and journalists are under attack and being accused of untrustworthiness, a book like “Rolling Blackouts” is remarkably timely (it was published just last year).
Glidden also just published a new short comic on The Nib last week about how artwork impacts our consideration of war. I’ll admit that with my degree in art history I couldn’t help but appreciate this comic-- gotta love meditations on how we interact with art.
I would recommend looking at all of Glidden’s work on the Nib, which has commented on many political events of this year. More of her work can be found at her website: sarahglidden.com
And in relation to “The Art of War,” I would be remiss to not share this other comics-related book from 2016:
“Disaster Drawn” by comics-scholar Hillary Chute considers how the drawn image uniquely communicates the horrors of war. Like Glidden in her comic on the Nib, Chute considers Goya and other artists that have documented political violence, before engaging with iconic graphic narratives such as “Maus,” “Barefoot Gen,” and the reportage comics of Joe Sacco. For those out there with a more academic bent, “Disaster Drawn” is a compelling read, and all of Chute’s books are interesting investigations as to how and why comics communicate personal narratives as well as they do.