Broken Frontier

Rutu Modan, Exit Wounds. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2007. 172 pp., color.

Rutu Modan is an Israeli cartoonist, and Exit Wounds is her first major graphic novel published in English. Nor was it merely published in English; despite Modan's background, Exit Wounds was in fact written in English, not her native tongue. Despite its status as a debut work written in a language not native to its author, however, Exit Wounds is a marvelous work, written and illustrated with the sure hand of a master craftsman.

Exit Wounds centers around a young Israeli cab driver, living in Tel Aviv with his uncle and aunt but alienated from his father in the aftermath of his mother's death. A young woman tracks him down with the suspicion that an unidentified corpse from a recent suicide bombing was in fact his father. Though suspicious of her, he is slowly drawn into an investigation of both his father's past and the mysterious body's identity.

Israel's political troubles remain for the most part well in the background of this graphic novel; save for the reality of suicide bombings (the story is set in 2002), little mention is made of war or rumors of war; I don't believe there are any Palestinian characters in the work. In this, it may well accurately represent the daily life of many Israelis, for whom Israel's troubles seem to be random, context-free incursions of violence into their daily lives. Thus, despite the political troubles setting the plot in motion, Exit Wounds is a largely personal work, whose mysteries are those of individual human relationships and decisions.

Exit Wounds is wonderfully written. Its characters are fully-realized individuals, with all the quirks and complexities of the best fictive characters. As is often true with real people, their motivations are as often hidden from themselves as they are from others. And the story itself is gripping, taking many twists and turns both into a compelling plot and into the depths of its character's psyches. The pun implied by the title is perhaps an obvious one -- the exiting that wounds is not only done by bullets and shrapnel but by people -- but the many different applications of it, and the various ways its shades of meaning fall, are not.

Exit Wounds takes its readers through a variety of emotional landscapes. One reviewer has said that the book reads like a romantic comedy; I think one might say with equal justification that there is more than a whiff of noir atmosphere to the work, in its detective-story structure, its web of lies and deceits, in unveiling of the endless vortex that lies behind the mask of the face. But all of this is not to say that the book is noir, any more than it is a romantic comedy: it is to say that it is a complex work, with lots of moods and modes, and that that is one of its chief charms.

For the most part Modan's art is equally adept. Her pacing as well as her page and panel composition are masterful; the body language of her characters, expressive; her backgrounds richly suggestive. Of particular note is her talent as a colorist. Her colors have a wonderful coolness and subtlety to them. While her palette reminds me of European masters such as Hergé, she is particularly skillful in its use in storytelling. Her use of muted background colors keeps one's eyes on the characters and in the flow of the story; places are evoked with simple yet subtle color combination that give each location an individual feel.

The one part of Modan's art that I feel is hit-or-miss is her depiction of people -- particularly faces. At times they are fine. At other times, however, the simple dots-and-lines style she employs doesn't quite bear the emotional weight that the story needs it to. A few other problems will occasionally dog Modan's portrayal of faces as well: the occasional chin mysteriously disappears for a panel or two; at one point a character's tears seem to hang from their eyes like patches of water-colored felt. Particularly in the book's first few pages, this occasional awkwardness in the drawing was (for me, anyway) distracting, drawing me out of the story.

By the time I was a third of the way into Exit Wounds, however, I barely noticed it any more: I was simply caught up in the story. The quirky, terribly human characters of Modan's tale had drawn me into their subtly-colored world, and I forgot about any issues of drawing style and simply raced forward to find out what happened. And while the story ends on a note of calculated ambiguity, it is (because of, not despite, this) a wonderfully satisfying tale. I think that most readers who take the journey will find themselves similarly entranced.

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Stephen Saperstein Frug is a struggling writer, an aspiring comics creator, a sometime teacher and an eternal student. He lives with his wife in Ithaca, New York under the ferocious dominion of two tiny, feathered dinosaurs. More of his writings can be read at his blog, Attempts: stephenfrug.blogspot.com.