MADreads

Walking wounded

May 21st, 2008 Barbara - Alicia Ashman

Set in contemporary Tel Aviv, Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds is populated by characters seemingly inured to violence and sudden death in their city.  But slips in their facades reveal them as walking wounded, driving away living relatives and lovers while mourning their dead.

Koby, a weary, disaffected taxi driver, is approached by Numi, a young woman soldier who thinks his estranged father may have been an unknown victim of a suicide bomber.  Reluctantly, Koby joins Numi in her quest to identify the unclaimed body.

Koby’s father, Gabriel, has abandoned his apartment and nobody in his family has heard from him for months.  Numi had been Gabriel’s lover and he disappeared from her life abruptly as well.  She is grasping at flimsy evidence:  a flash of a scarf that she had knit for Gabriel appeared in television footage of a bomb site.

The gallows humor throughout the work bounces between funny and chilling. Scenes with Koby and Numi bickering with a clerk at the morgue while a young boy tries to identify his father’s body by viewing videotape of a corpse’s ear are unsettling and painful.

Koby and Numi are each lost too:  nursing hurts and slights by their respective families, unable to move forward. The book gracefully unmasks these prickly individuals, challenging assumptions they have made about themselves and each other.  Skillfully rendered ligne claire art, with interesting angles and perspectives, combines with artful storytelling to create a compelling graphic novel.  Beautiful, absurd, sometimes wrenchingly sad Exit Wounds is graphic storytelling at its finest.

Modan also has a terrific blog at the New York Times called Mixed Emotions.  Refreshingly un-bloggy (NYT refers to Mixed Emotions as a “visual column”), it consists of a set of fabulous illustrated essays.  Don’t miss her piece called The Queen of the Scottish Fairies!

Entry Filed under: Graphic Novel, Mystery, Romance