Exit Wounds

Exit Wounds is a comic about a man who meets a woman who was involved with his father. He then gets involved with her in a wild search to discover if an unclaimed body during a subway bombing is the body of his father. We later find out that his father is not dead but alive and dating a couple different women at the same time. Gabriel Franco, the father of Koby Franco is never seen in the comic. He is an estranged father in every sense of the word. He hasn’t really been in Koby’s life since his wife past away and even before then, Koby recounts stories about the times he was there and the relationship was still bad. At the point where the story begins, Koby has not seen his father in two years. He has a lot of hostility and resentment against him and the reader is not entirely sure why. Koby’s sister, Orly, lives in New York and also seems to be very much out of touch with her father as well, but a bit more forgiving for the mistakes that he made in the past.

The story is set in Israel in 2002. Even though we hear about some bombings happening here and there, the larger narrative excludes any mention of tensions between Israel and Palestine. It’s like the reader gets a look into a world where the outside hostilities between people have little to no significance. However, I’m not even sure if that statement is valid. Israel does not seem like a where the people are living in fear. Death seems to have lost its out of the ordinary nature. This observation comes from both Koby’s cold reaction to his father’s death and the reactions of the people at the pathological institute for forensics medicine. The doctors talk about plans for lunch as they are cutting open someone’s intestines, someone indentifying the body of a loved one asks for the video recording, and the front desk hostess seems a bit too cherry especially since she works in a morgue. The overall process or get the body, cleaning up the blood, opening the body’s up to study them, storing them, and putting them into coffins happens without and commentary and moves through from frame to frame. The commonality of death is also evidenced in the initial confusion about which bombing is being refereed to. In December there was a bombing at Hadera, and the next day a larger bombing at Haifa. One seems to over shadow the other, but life still goes on, even if it is in the shadow of death.

The question of whether or not Rutu Modan’s position on death in and the bombings/explosions in Israel is still up in the air for me. I don’t know if there is a larger critique implicit in this comic. She deals with two deaths in the story: the death of Koby’s mother five years ago and the possible death of his father. The first death distanced a father from his son even more. Since the day that Koby’s mother died five years ago, he has only seen his father; he has only seen his father five times in the three subsequent years after her death. Also, the plausible death of his father brings distress only because there was so much that would have gone unsaid between them. For these two reasons I believe that Modan is more concerned with the way death functions in a social context. After all, the comic is entitled Exit Wounds.