by joe eskenazi
staff writer
Rutu Modan writes in Hebrew. But she draws in English — really, no joke.
When Modan was laying out her graphic novel, “Exit Wounds,” she wrote out the dialogue in her native tongue and then drew the panels. A translator filled the voice balloons with English text; the Hebrew version is coming out now, months after the English, Spanish and French versions.
But, again, this comic book was “drawn in English.” And that creates problems for Modan as she has to reverse every page and panel to accommodate a language that reads from right to left. And since the book’s protagonist, Koby Franco, is a cab driver, she can’t simply reverse his many driving panels, lest it appear Franco is suddenly picking up fares and motoring about on the left side of the road in Great Britain rather than keeping to the right in Tel Aviv. Those parts have to be redrawn from scratch.
It’s a bother, but a bother Modan is happy to have. Comic book jobs do not abound in Israel. And while the Pow! Biff! Sock! of Spiderman, Batman and the Fantastic Four form integral components of the language of American childhood, such is not the case in Israel.
“I think Israel was the only country where Superman was a commercial failure,” said Modan with a laugh. Along with novelist Michal Govrin, Modan was the second female Israeli author brought through San Francisco this month by the Israeli Consulate.
In fact, there was such a dearth of Hebrew-language comics during Modan’s childhood in the early 1970s that she remembers drawing her own comics before reading them in the papers. Not surprisingly, she recalls the first comics she read with great clarity.
“It was an advertisement encouraging children to drink milk in the newspaper, in the format of comics. And I was
addicted to this. It was the first Israeli superhero, a small boy who drank milk and became powerful — like Popeye with milk,” says Modan, who spoke last week at San Francisco’s Cartoon Museum and other venues during her lightning book tour visit.
It wasn’t until Modan was a university-level art student that an instructor from Belgium — a nation renowned almost solely for comics, beer, chocolate, waffles and beer — showed her American and European alternative comics of the 1980s. It was a Pow! Biff! Sock! moment for Modan — she instantly knew that drawing comics was what she wanted to do in life.
Incidentally, while female comic artists are a rarity in most nations, Israel, with no comic tradition, has developed a proportionately high number as comics gradually catch on. As for why Superman and friends fell victim to the kryptonite of poor Israeli sales, Modan simply feels that a nation of 6 million Hebrew speakers is too small a place to market to (while comic hotbed Belgium is small, too, there are many millions of French speakers worldwide). Israeli films are flourishing, but the government has seen fit to bequeath money on the industry. It is unlikely if Israel’s government will ever shower money on comic books.
The critically acclaimed “Exit Wounds,” not surprisingly, shows traces of the influence of Belgian comic master Hergé (you may have grown up reading his Tintin comics) in its layout and the minimalist yet evocative faces of its protagonists, Koby and Numi. The pair drive from Tel Aviv to Hadera to investigate whether an unidentifiable victim of a suicide bombing is Koby’s estranged father.
While apolitical, Modan sees “Exit Wounds” as an only-in-Israel story — Israel is a country where one end of the country is close to the other and families hold on to each other even more closely.
“They are living in a very extreme reality. But they don’t want to think about it. They want to deal with their own lives,” she says of her characters.
Comics are “still new medium. You can still invent and people are looking for new ways to tell stories. It’s nice being a part of it.”
“Exit Wounds,” by Rutu Modan (172 pages, Drawn and Quarterly, $19.95)
CopyrightJ, the Jewish news weekly of Northern California