Dirk Deppey pointed out yesterday that you can now subscribe to the online-only edition of The Comics Journal. And if you want to try before you buy, they’ve made issue #288 available for free, which features Joe Sacco interviewing Rutu Modan:
Exit Wounds is your first book-length comic. If you don’t mind my simplifying the plot, it’s about a somewhat awkward young woman, Numi, who believes the unidentified victim of a suicide bombing is her elderly lover, Gabriel. She tracks down Gabriel’s estranged son, Koby, and he reluctantly gets involved in her effort to prove the body is Gabriel’s. This certainly seems like the sort of story that could be based on a real incident. Was it?
The main plot is based on an actual event, a body that was destroyed in a terror attack on a bus. This has happened before, unfortunately, but this time no one claimed the body. It seems it was a body of someone no one missed. A wonderful documentary was done on this event (No. 17 by David Ofek). The director tried to find the identity of the body. I saw the film and it was so strong. We would like to think that if we disappeared at least someone would notice — a relative, a neighbor, at least the vendor at our local shop. Although I’ve not experienced a terror attack myself, it was happening a lot around me a few years ago, and it did affect my everyday life and feelings. But sudden, brutal deaths are actually around all of us, anywhere, anytime, not just in Israel. (Every death feels sudden and brutal, even those called “natural.”) I tried to describe this in Exit Wounds, and not just the dramatic side of it, but also the matter-of-factness of death and the everyday aspect of it.
