Exit Wounds
Reading “Exit Wounds” was a strange experience because throughout the course of it, I kept being reminded of a lot of the other books in our course. There were so many images that felt déjà vu-ish, like they were repeating graphic novel archetypes.
Kobi has a little bit of Ben Tanaka in him and a little bit of Vampire Dave too – the sequence of panels on page 149 of Kobi in his taxi driving a series of people from all walks of life was especially reminiscent of the early section in “Life Sucks” where we see the morose Dave at the cash register while a string of customers come up to him (it’s the part where the blonde woman asks for adult diapers).
The scene on page 156 where Kobi finds an old snow globe from his childhood, immediately reminded me of Laurie’s snow globe memory on Mars in “Watchmen”, and the panels where Kobi and Numi eat lunch on the beach triggered the image from “Black Hole” where Chris and Rob cut class and camp by the ocean.
There were places in the story where there were arrows and footprint trajectories which were reminiscent of the diagrams and graphs in “Night Fisher”, and also this image:
And the foreign setting but recognizable story arc of a love story creates the same feeling that we experienced with “Aya” – something that is alien yet familiar at the same time.
I think that I read “Exit Wounds” this way – through drawing parallels with other works and patching together associations – because I was trying to put it into some perspective which made it easier to categorize. And I think that this complicated, elusive quality in the book somehow relates to the identity questions of modern Israelis. “Exit Wounds” is many things at once; it’s slippery, subtle, and impossible to pin down, deceptively simple in appearance. It’s about the Israel/Palestine conflict while not being about the Israel/Palestine conflict at all. The interviewer points out the elephant in the room in the afterward: “The Palestinians are never even mentioned”.
The style of illustration had the same effect on me; at first it made me think of the Chris Ware piece from McSweeney’s about the girl with the prosthetic leg, then I thought it was more like “Shortcomings”, then I also thought of Tintin, and finally I just stopped trying to make analogies and considered the visuals on their own terms.
As others have mentioned, Modan sometimes uses the technique of using washed out colors, usually in the background, and brighter, solid hues on particular subjects. This brings certain things into focus, and other things fade away. In a parallel sense, the newspaper clippings in the story (on pages 37 and 65) are drawn with the color drained away too. News about bombs and attacks is so commonplace that it is pushed away and becomes background noise; Modan states in the interview at the end that “When the reality around you is so complicated or too frightening, people tend to detach themselves from it”. Could the technique of setting vividly-colored figures against dull ones in the panels be a visual interpretation of this cultural mindset?
Well…the technique is called chiaroscuro in art–using vivid contrasts between light and dark to dramatize. You’re right to call attention to those two panels, for example–they do seem, well, not derivative, but in relationship.
The Snow Globe thing is eerie. I, for example, do not have one. But they do appear a great deal in comics, and always as a way to project nostalgia. It’s like they appear in comics perhaps more than life. Because, perhaps, they’re such an easy way to create pathos?
I think the Israeli – Palestine conflict is a sort of.. minor character, more than a subject, in Exit Wounds. I couldn’t find it in me to say this is ‘about’ that. I think it’s more that it is fundamental to the lives of the characters, so much so that it’s like the weather. But the story is very much about the way the boy’s father moves across the landscape spreading a lover’s chaos across the lives of an outsize number of women. When Kobi gives up, he does so because in part I think he wearies of being so close to the pain his father is causing. It seems as if there’s no end to the number of women he’s deceived and he moves towards what feels like the door out. Whether it is or not.