White cloudy bits

In the six “I traveled more” panels, color spills over sparse lines, creating a sense of imperfect, hazy memory.  Visual (rather cliché or hegemonic-ish) metonyms for places replace detail: India is yoga and a particular style of architecture, Mexico is a beach, and Egypt is a camel, a head-covering, sand dunes, and pyramids (paging Edward Said).  Uncolored white paper gaps poke through the intermingling colors, imitating watercolor blurring or a badly developed photograph:  memory is, as most responses have already mentioned, a process of reconstruction, by no means ahistorical (i.e. outside of signifiers from 19^th Century European and Anglo-American travel writing, Rick Steves’ videos, National Geographic, etc.).

More generally, white, uneven gaps between colors and color-line spillage shows up in panels that retell Sandell’s father’s stories, panels of dialogue (or monologue) between her father and her, and (to a lesser extent) panels with Ben and her.  For example, on pages 66-67, the white spaces highlight Sandell’s father’s word bubbles.  Lines seem distinct and color seems self-contained when Sandell is immersed in her father’s storytelling, yet his words seem encompassed in a porous word cloud (rather than a clear-cut bubble).  His stories seem to have no limits; the mythos surrounding them (the white space) overshadows the words themselves.  Boundaries between her father’s words and her own sense of self seem unfixed; his stories (the white space) overtake the other colors so that his story almost takes the place of external setting.  They could sit on any chair, couch, floor, piece of ground (all of which fade into the background), and his stories would become “the” story, complementing Sandell’s assertion that her own voice becomes a medium for his.  For example, she tells his stories to “bond with men” (Sandell 61).  When Sandell tells her father’s stories to celebrities and to Ben, when his stories are the central part of her self-narrative, white space extends outside of the word bubbles (Sandell 104-105, 108-109, 125).  White space visually connects Sandell and her father as “like” when it illuminates both father and daughter’s faces as she listens to his stories.  Her own white-spilling (or white lie-spilling) word bubbles reinforce this effect.

When she believes in or suspends disbelief for his stories, colors and lines shore up, and both characters seem more hermetically sealed, presenting an illusion that people can be intact and their stories truthful in a certain sense.  At these moments, the tightness of the color enclosure seems to either give sway to her father’s (or her own) indulgence in full-fledged persona or to suggest the idyllic wholeness that she experiences when she accepts his stories as they are.  As she questions his stories, this same rigid color encapsulation within each figure or object seems to shut out other elements, an attempt to separate the truth from fiction and self from father, the “present” setting with the omnipresent settings of her father’s stories.  (86-87, 127, 143, 146-147, 150-152).

A few word bubbles that don’t leak white show up at moments of stability, as when the family moves frequently, a pattern of movement that Sandell can count on, even if also brings up feelings of instability or plants doubts about her father’s livelihood (Sandell 29).  As Sandell approaches sobriety or has moments wherein the consequences of her substance use become stark to her, the white gaps around word bubbles sometimes become slightly more symmetrical and even, in the spacing between the lines, other colors, and the white spaces (204).  Exceptions such as uneven white lines around word bubbles and images may illustrate Sandell’s thoughts, in-between intoxication and uncomfortably sober realization, such as those realizations about her sex life with Ben (Sandell 132-135).  In panels that feature denial about alcohol, Ambien, and the efficacy of therapy, white spaces are clear but uneven lines (Sandell 200).  What do pastel green, blue, purple, etc. blocks around words do, when they sit on white space, all surrounding narrative box text?  Is there any significance to the shift in color palette from pastel to dreary earth tones (lack of sobriety, uncomfortable moments of sobriety before full sobriety, end to a relationship, liminal space/life transitions, etc.)?