The Role of the Personal Experience in Major Events

A lot of the graphic novels we've read thus far have dealt with foreign times, places, cultures and this week isn't an exception.  Jobnik! gives us a peak into the life of an American girl who joins the Israeli Defense Force just before the second intifada.  The first time I read Jobnik! I had just wrapped up a paper on women in the IDF and I had a relatively good handle on the history of the conflict and the major political issues and players involved.  It made my experience with the book radically different from what I might have had without a lot of background knowledge. I was able to really focus on her story and experiences because I wasn't super confused by the surrounding details of the conflict.

There is this odd, but fantastically descriptive, mix of news reports combined with her worry over Shahar (and others), and how - in the midst of everything - life kind of continues on in small ways in the middle of such events.  The worry, tension, and shock after so long can become a hum in the background [as illustrated by news report text as background on page 58].  Miriam can still be caught up in personal drama, she can still dye her hair, and none of that means that the world around her is unimportant.  It just can't be all consuming all the time for all those involved.

Quite frankly the fact that she chose to incorporate the text of news reports (accurate to the day as described in the author's notes) and still show that she was living day-to-day in her world within the larger conflict is pretty impressive.  If Miriam wasn't so grounded in telling her own story she might have turned the comic into something a bit impersonal - a macro-level history lesson or political diatribe.  Even though on BOS 244 she describes herself as feeling "guilty that [her] comics don't try to go beyond [her] own experience" as I reader I appreciate being let-in on her experiences in such raw detail.

I know the history of the conflict, and I know the events, but I don't know too many personal experiences connected to those events.  There is an important place for stories like these to remind us that the day-to-day doesn't come to a complete halt, even when it looks like everything is in melt down mode.