Exit Wounds, by Rutu Modan

Rutu Modan is an Israeli graphic novelist whose book Exit Wounds (2007) was well received by fans of the genre and critics, quickly appearing on the “best of graphic fiction” list in the New York Magazine as well as Time. A year later, the book received the Eisner Award for the best graphic album. This award, the Oscar of the comic book, is named after Will Eisner, who coined the expression “graphic novel” in 1978 after publishing A Contract With God. By now, Modan’s Exit Wounds has been translated into ten languages.[1]

Exit Wounds is a tale of mystery and love set between Tel Aviv and Hadera in Israel. Koby Franco, a shy and disillusioned taxi driver, has been estranged from his father for two years. The story opens when Koby receives a phone call from Numi, a soldier that informs that his father is a casualty of a bombing. The young woman, who had recently been his lover, believes that he is the unidentified victim because she has not heard from the man in several days and she gets a glimpse of a keepsake in the news reports. With great reluctance, Koby agrees to follow Numi on the search to find clues that may help locate his father. In the search to discover the truth, in a region beset by the war, Modan captures how people cope with trauma and how simple human affection develops.

Exit Wounds is an elegant but unsentimental display of line drawings and simple, yet insightful dialogues. Modan uses the ligne claire style, of straight even lines without the use of hatching to create shading, which was popularized by Hergé in Les Aventures de Tintin. The backgrounds are very realistic, even though they are often drawn in monochromatic colors. The watercolors utilized in the book are beautiful, luscious. Overall, it is possible to assert that the author paid great attention to the every detail of image and dialogue.

Besides being about love and romance, Exit Wounds is also about death. They mystery of the unidentified body, that unites Koby and Numi, was inspired by the documentary N^o 17, in which the director David Ofek attempts to identify the only unidentified victim of a bombing of a bus on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. In the afterword to Exit Wounds, Modan relates the impact the film had on her, noting that “We would like to think that if we disappear at least someone would notice. But sudden, brutal deaths are actually around all of us, anywhere, anytime, not just in Israel. Ever death feels sudden and brutal, even those called natural.”[2] For Modan, death is a central part of life, and Exit Wounds shows death – even the most cruel – as also being something that reunites people.

The search to establish the body’s identity takes the reader back and forth between Hadera and Tel Aviv. Interestingly, the political situation in Israel is only mentioned through various allusions: bombings, overcrowding of the morgue and the loss of children in the war. Even though conflict is tangible in the background, it is only represented in an indirect manner. To explain this important blank space she says:

When the reality around you is so complicated or too frightening, people tend to detach themselves from it. We cannot live our lives fearing what is going to happen next, we have to protect ourselves. I know it seems strange that Palestinians are not mentioned in the story. Israelis prefer not to think about the context of terror. […] It is too complicated to think of the context (and it depends on who you ask), and depressing, too.”[3]

Even though I immensely enjoyed reading Exit Wounds, I did feel uncomfortable at the complete absence of the life of Palestinians. Why was Modan completely incapable of naming the political problem – the Israeli occupation – and only capable of alluding to it? We must ask the question: is not this amnesia part of the problem?

Israelis may prefer “not to think about the context of terror” but this does not justify not doing so. However, some Israelis object to the occupation on moral grounds, and have called for the creation of an independent Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders. In 1993, it seemed that the occupation would finally end with the signing of the Oslo Agreement in Washington and that the withdrawal from the occupied territories would lead to the creation of a Palestinian State. Unfortunately, as we know, the Oslo Agreement did not lead to the desired results. In fact, it only permitted Israel to maintain occupation in a more “sophisticated form”. The result is an increasingly militarized and belligerent state – as the raid on the international aid flotilla on its way to Gaza has certainly proven. As Yeshayahu Leibovitz, an Israeli philosopher, warned in 1968: “A state governing a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners is bound to become a Shin Bet (Security Service) state, with all that this implies for the spirit of education, freedom of speech and thought and democracy. Israel will be infected with corruption, characteristic of any colonial regime”. [4] That’s a context worth thinking about.

Drawn & Quarterly
Rutu Modan - Mixed Emotions - New York Times - Blog


[1] Kobi Ben-Simhon, Books, Hors-série, no. 2, avril-mai 2010, p.49.
[2] Rutu Modan. Exit Wounds. Montreal, Drawn & Quarterly, 2008, p. 180-181.
[3] Ibid.
[4] See Tanya Reinhart. Israel/Palestine. How to End the War of 1948. New York, Seven Stories Press, 2005 (Second Edition).