The Comics of Rutu Modan: War, Love, and Secrets

INTRODUCTION

"From the beginning, I stress for my students the connection between being a comics artist and being a yazam, Rutu Modan tells me. The closest translation is probably entrepreneur." We are sitting in a bookstore and café in central Tel Aviv, just down the block from the frenetic Carmel Market in the busiest part of the city. Around us, customers are chatting loudly in both Hebrew and English. At a distant table, we can even hear two young women conversing in French. Rutu is drinking an Americano, with a glass of hot water on the side, which she uses periodically to reheat the drink and make it last.

Over the whirring of an espresso machine, Modan says, First of all, for me it’s very natural to do that. She is referring to being an entrepreneur, and an advocate for her own success. I always worked this way. I never waited for things to happen. The truth of her statement is apparent from her career. She began as a modest art student in Jerusalem, in a country that had virtually no comics tradition, and has now become an award-winning graphic novelist with an international following. Along the way, she has practically pulled the Israeli comics scene into existence through her own publications, through her collaborations with other artists, and through her smart and practical view of how to be successful and prolific as an artist.

Modan’s default mode, in person and in interviews, is humor—most of it self-directed. She makes fun of both her personality and her abilities and speaks readily of her many failures when she was just starting out. But the humor cannot obscure her accomplishments; they add up too quickly, and she is honest about recognizing the steps she has taken to succeed. For Modan, being a comics artist has always meant taking charge of her own career. She has often performed all the stages of production, from writing to art to editing to publishing, nurturing both her own work and that of many other Israeli artists. She pairs her work as a comics artist with actively teaching comics artists at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and her teaching always incorporates what it means to be a successful professional. There simply would not be a significant Israeli comics scene now without the last twenty-five years of Modan’s activity as a writer, artist, publisher, and teacher.

This is what makes Rutu Modan important to study, to consider, and to discuss at this key point in her career. At fifty, Modan might seem young for a major retrospective of a comics creator. One imagines that she has a number of significant works still to come; in fact, based on her industrious nature and the arc of her career so far, it seems highly likely that she will continue to be prolific and give us much more to discuss in the future. But to look at her now is to gain insight into a national comics scene at a critical time in its history. She has been called a one-woman industry (Kra-Oz), and the mother of Israeli comics (Korver). The metaphorical range—from mechanical to maternal—only reinforces the multifaceted roles that Modan plays in Israeli comics.

Modan was born near Tel Aviv in 1966 and grew up just a few minutes’ drive from the café where we sit to talk about her work. Israel is, of course, a very small country, and the majority of the population lives within a tiny central area between the Mediterranean Sea on one side and the West Bank on the other. This densely populated strip of land, which includes both Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, stretches from northern to southern Israel like a rubber band. Rutu is a still-young artist in a still-young country. The Israeli comics scene is even younger, and almost all of it happens in home studios and university classrooms within an hour’s radius of the café where Modan and I are sitting.

As the most prominent member of a diverse and rapidly developing comics scene, Modan gives us insight into how art worlds, to borrow Howard Becker’s term, take root and flourish. Her work shows us how a nation with a complicated history and politics is depicted in text and image. And looking at her career helps us explore how one woman, in a field typically dominated by men, can develop the skills to write, illustrate, edit, collaborate, publish, and promote her work in a way that makes space for other artists from her country to do so as well.

Comics artists as well as scholars routinely cite Modan as one of today’s leading writer-artists, not just in Israel but in the international world of graphic novels. Both of her full-length graphic novels, Exit Wounds and The Property, won Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards (commonly known as Eisner Awards), the leading award given by the comics industry. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, and other newspapers with national and international readerships. But though she often receives brief mentions or glancing discussion in comics studies contexts, she has yet to receive a lengthy scholarly study of her own.

Though she would be a natural subject for study in her home country, Israeli comics scholarship remains in the infancy stage. The Israeli Cartoon Museum (which provided invaluable research materials and assistance to this volume), founded in 2007, has helped to promote interest in both historical and contemporary comics in Israel, but its influence is still new, and few Israeli academics pursue comics studies. Among Western comics scholars, a larger issue is the relative lack of intellectual space given to comics artists not just from Israel but from the Middle East generally. While the Iranian-born Marjane Satrapi has received significant attention, she is the exception, and Satrapi has spent much of her life in Europe, which has made her work more accessible and visible to Western scholars than comics artists who continue to live and work in the Middle East or North Africa. Indeed, comics scholars have typically focused more on Western artists whose subject matter is the Middle East than on Middle Eastern artists themselves. Hillary L. Chute’s recent Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form is an excellent study but acknowledges its own limitations in this particular way. Chute cites as notable the work of Modan, Satrapi, the Israeli Ari Folman (Waltz with Bashir), the Egyptian Magdy El Shafee (Metro: A Story of Cairo) and the Lebanese Lamia Ziade (Bye Bye Babylon: Beirut 1975–1979), among several others. But the only book about the Middle East to receive a sustained reading is Footnotes in Gaza, a graphic novel about the Gaza Strip and Israel by Joe Sacco, who was born in Malta and lives in the United States.

Outside the Middle Eastern context, Modan intersects with several areas that have been the focus of recent scholarly studies, but for various reasons, she tends to land just outside the purview of these works. Recent years have seen important examinations of comics artists from both a Jewish and a female perspective (and even a Jewish female perspective), but the ways in which Modan fails to fit within these studies reveal her unique position within these intersections. They also suggest some of the delimiting ways in which scholars are writing about comics. In America, Jewish artists and comic books have long been linked, particularly in mainstream superhero comics, where Jewish creators such as Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, Joe Schuster, and others represent some of the most prolific and significant cultural production (Fingeroth). The alternative comix movement of the 1970s and the more recent proliferation of graphic novels are also strongly associated with Jewish writers and artists, including highly influential figures such as Art Spiegelman, Harvey Pekar, Trina Robbins, and James Sturm (A. Kaplan). Because of the immensity of American Jewish influence in comics and graphic novels, scholars interested in looking at comics from a Jewish perspective almost inevitably focus on America and its Jewish comics artists. The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches, edited by Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman, offers a good example. It is one of the few Jewish studies volumes to include comics artists from outside America, but because of the attention any such volume necessarily must give to American Jewish creators, it is able to attend to non-American work only in a limited way. The book devotes two of its three main parts to American writers and artists. The third part is left to address non-American Jewish comics and includes two essays on France’s Joann Sfar, and two essays that examine multiple Israeli authors, including Modan.

It is not just the volume of American Jewish comics production that has limited the scholarly space given to Israeli artists. From a cultural and religious perspective, examinations are complicated by the disparate ways that American Jews and Israeli Jews experience their Jewishness. As the majority religion in a small country, rather than a minority religion in a large country, Israeli Jewish culture operates very differently from American Jewish culture. This can make the specifically Jewish elements of Israeli work more difficult to identify or, at the least, call for them to be considered within their own Israeli context, with its own vocabulary. Scholars reading American Jewish comics artists from a minority perspective must contend with a very different history and experience when examining Israeli artists, if they choose to do so at all.

Further, Rutu Modan, like most, if not all, prominent Israeli comics artists, identifies as secular, a subject position that foregrounds Israeli national identity over religious identity and has its own complex relationship to Jewishness. Modan herself is the child of a religious father and a secular mother, and as we will explore more fully later, she has her own individual relationship to Jewish culture and text. All of this argues for a consideration of Modan’s work, as this book attempts to do, that examines the intersections of her national, religious, and cultural identities in their own context and within the larger context of Israeli culture, rather than as an extension of American-focused Jewish comics studies.

Modan’s identity as a female artist is also unique within the growing body of work by female comics artists. One of the most important scholarly corrections of the last few years has been greater attentiveness to the voices of female comics artists, whose contributions have historically been overlooked in favor of their male counterparts. A number of important studies have emerged recently. Before writing Disaster Drawn, Hillary L. Chute produced Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. Chute cites Modan as one of a number of contemporary female comics artists who are at the leading edge of graphic narratives. But Chute’s focus in this earlier work is on autobiographical narrative, rightly noting that much of the specific contribution being made by books such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home derives from the powerful way in which the artists’ own lives and often traumatic experiences are rendered in both text and image. Unlike the comics artists on whom Chute focuses (and unlike many of the important contemporary female comics artists with whom she might otherwise be grouped, such as Satrapi, Bechdel, Miriam Katin, and fellow Israeli Ilana Zeffren), Modan works almost exclusively in fiction. Thus while Graphic Women honors Modan by using one of her illustrations for its cover image, Modan’s work gets only a brief mention in the book.

Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews, edited by Sarah Lightman, covers some of the same territory as Chute’s book but offers a specifically Jewish perspective and a focus on both well-known and lesser-known comics artists. Again, Modan’s primary focus on fiction excludes her from consideration in that important study. Though her work at times skews closely to autobiography—her most recent graphic novel, The Property, is an example—for various reasons that we will explore later, Modan has found fiction a more productive lens than nonfiction through which to explore the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the lingering trauma of the Holocaust, and other subjects that form core parts of the Israeli psyche. She is also strongly influenced by fiction tropes such as the detective story and other formal elements that occur in her plots. Modan has often spoken of her reluctance to write directly about Israel when she was a young artist, a choice that certainly pushed her toward fiction rather than nonfiction. But as her writing developed, it became clear that fiction itself is one of her subjects. In an appreciation of Modan written for Drawn and Quarterly’s twenty-fifth anniversary volume, Ariel Kahn observes that for Modan, reality is often composed of helpfully self-serving fictions. Her characters tell each other stories that might not be true but help us avoid a more disturbing reality. That story might be about the Holocaust, about a bus bombing, or even just about a lover who left. Inevitably in Modan’s work, these stories cannot hold up. What happens when these stories unravel, Kahn continues, is one of Modan’s key thematic preoccupations (Kahn, Saving Fictions 361).

As a Jewish artist, as a female artist, and as an Israeli artist, Modan occupies her own unique space. This book explores the roles that each of those identities play in Modan’s work. It also recognizes the way that Modan’s artistic output combines her different identities, both as a sum of those parts and as its own, indistinguishable whole, making a unique contribution to Jewish comics, feminist comics, and Israeli comics.

Rutu Modan is the grandchild of Polish refugees from Nazism who emigrated to Israel and restarted their lives in the early days of the new Jewish state. Modan grew up as the child of doctors who devoted themselves to Israeli public life and society. Her early life is marked by the Yom Kippur War, which occurred when she was six (some of her earliest drawings depict wounded soldiers coming back from the front). After her compulsory military service, she entered the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, the institution that has served as the center of the Israeli painting, drawing, photography, and film scene for more than one hundred years.

Chapter 1, The Tradition of No Tradition, discusses her early life, her army service, and her entry into comics through her studies at Bezalel, where she turned away from traditional painting and toward comics techniques. At Bezalel, she was introduced to the work of Art Spiegelman, especially Maus and the comix scene represented by Raw and other publications, as well as the work of European comics artists who would have a lasting influence on her work. The chapter also places Modan in the larger context of the history of Israeli comics, from the early comic strips mostly aimed at children and focused on establishing a uniquely Israeli identity, to the entry of European-and American-style comics in the 1970s, to the beginnings of a sophisticated and diverse art comics scene that began with Modan and her contemporaries in the 1990s.

Chapter 2, Actus Tragicus and the Making of an Israeli Comics Scene, explores Modan’s early work as a founding member of Actus Tragicus (active from 1998 to 2010), a comics collective that helped define and grow the small but influential Israeli comics community. The chapter situates Actus Tragicus and Modan within the larger Israeli cultural scene, particularly the way that comics interacted with Israeli literature and film, and explores the work of the other Actus artists who influenced—and were influenced by—Modan. For Modan and the collective’s other members, Actus Tragicus filled multiple roles. First, it jump-started a recognizably Israeli comics aesthetic, with Modan at its core. Second, it provided Modan with an opportunity to experiment with the themes that became important in her graphic novels: strong female protagonists, the realities and limitations of Israeli society, and the difficulty of establishing loving relationships in a society bracketed by war and tragedy. Third, it marked the beginning of her practice of partnering closely with other Israeli writers and comics artists, a practice that continues to be an important feature of her career. This period, in particular, marks her first collaboration with Etgar Keret, one of Israel’s leading fiction writers and Modan’s contemporary; and with Yirmi Pinkus, an Israeli comics artist and novelist who is Modan’s most regular and important collaborator.

Chapter 3, "Exit Wounds: The Palpable Presence of Absence," discusses Modan’s move toward writing directly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, culminating in her breakthrough graphic novel, Exit Wounds. The chapter conducts a close reading of both Modan’s story Jamilti and Exit Wounds, examining the ways that love and relationships exist within a world circumscribed by violence. It also explores the evolution of Modan’s version of clear line style, which complicates and problematizes the version associated with Hergé and other European artists.

The success of Exit Wounds gave Modan an international reputation, producing new opportunities in Israel and abroad. Her Actus Tragicus stories were collected into Jamilti and other Stories, also published by Drawn and Quarterly, and new graphic narratives were serialized in the New York Times and elsewhere. Chapter 4, "After Exit Wounds: Serialization, Collaboration, and Comics for Children," examines the important ways that Modan’s work expanded during this period, including her first sustained autobiographical narratives (especially Mixed Emotions, which appeared in the New York Times), her first comics journalism (War Rabbit, about the 2009 Israel-Gaza conflict), and her successful children’s book, Seuda etzel ha-malka (A royal banquet with the queen). These comics provide an opportunity to examine the evolution of Modan’s work, as well as to investigate the multiple roles that a successful comics artist can inhabit. At the same time, the growth in her work prompts new questions. How does serialization in a major newspaper demand different narratives than a long-planned graphic novel? What does it mean to produce politically charged work at the same time as one is creating books for children? How does one represent a country like Israel to the world?

The Property, Modan’s graphic novel after Exit Wounds, represents a cohering of many of her recurring themes and the most mature iteration of her work to date. It grapples with the legacy of the Holocaust, contemporary Israeli-European relations, and Modan’s own lightly fictionalized personal history, supported by her characteristic layered storytelling and strong female characters. Chapter 5, "The Property and the Possibilities of Post-Holocaust Europe," includes a close reading of The Property and an examination of the layers of multiple traditions in which it engages. The graphic novel is influenced by Holocaust literature but also investigates how the current generation of Israelis and Poles negotiate their shared histories. It also returns to themes that Modan explored in Exit Wounds, such as women’s relationships across generations, the desire for love, and the keeping of secrets. In this way, The Property represents an extension of Exit Wounds, but also a powerful move forward for Modan’s work, as well as the book for which she has found the strongest response within Israel.

Chapter 6, The Return of Uri Cadduri and the Future of Israeli Comics, explores Modan’s current focus, as well as future directions her work is likely to take. In 2013, Modan and former fellow Actus Tragicus member Yirmi Pinkus launched Noah Books, an Israeli imprint focused on children’s graphic narratives. The imprint’s first book, illustrated by Modan, is Uri Cadduri, based on an important Israeli cartoon character from the 1950s. The chapter explores the development of Noah Books, its role in reviving early Israeli comics in a contemporary context, and the challenge of creating comics literacy and audience.

Still relatively young, Modan has the potential to write and draw many more graphic novels, as well as to create other cultural products both for an Israeli audience and for audiences abroad. As a well-known cultural figure in a small but fiercely creative country, Modan can have enormous influence. At the same time, her work is in demand internationally. Israel has become a major exporter of television, literature, and film, and Modan’s work as artist and publisher has the possibility to elevate the Israeli comics scene to the same level of international attention.

A NOTE ON DEFINITIONS

Modern Hebrew distinguishes between comics (comiks, or