Drawn & Quarterly Announces Next Sarah Glidden Graphic Novel, ‘Rolling Blackouts’

Good news for fans of comics journalism: Indie publisher Drawn & Quarterly has announced that Sarah Glidden, the cartoonist behind 2011's stunning How To Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, will continue her travels -- and, more importantly for readers, her travelogues -- with a new book, Rolling Blackouts, due late next year.

Glidden's new book will see the cartoonist travel through the Middle East, exploring the fall-out from the Iraq War not only on the region, but also on two childhood friends - One an anti-war journalist accompanying Glidden, the other a marine who fought in the conflict - looking at the interplay between the political, social and personal implications of war.

In the announcement from the publisher, D&Q's Creative Director and Acquiring Editor Tom Devlin praised Glidden for her "exciting approach to comics journalism," saying that there's "an honest simplicity in Sarah's approach that makes you trust her -- it draws you in," and adding that "she crafts subtle and rich stories by asking questions but not demanding answers. She brings you along on her search. You learn with her."

Talking to Comics Alliance in 2010, Glidden herself emphasized this approach, saying ""I just hope [How to to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less] will show [readers] that they're not the only ones who are not sure, and that just because the loudest voices around you seem to be so certain and you might not be so certain, that it just means that they're the loudest; it doesn't mean that they're right. Before I came to terms with this idea that it's okay to be questioning, I thought that I had to pick a side to be certain, and now i realize that if I ever think that I'm certain again, then its probably a bad sign. So i hope that people read it and be okay with being in the gray area, and not just about Israel but about anything. I also hope that they can see it as a way of how a person can struggle with anything like that, and I think that that idea of going from certainty to uncertainty and then becoming okay with that idea can be universal, can be a struggle that anyone can go through, whether they're Jewish or Israeli or not."

On her blog yesterday, Glidden responded to the news by calling Drawn & Quarterly "the publisher I didn't even dare dream of working with when I started making comics, so I couldn't be more excited to work with them," and sharing a page of the work-in-progress: