‘It’s just a comic’ - Or is it? Addressing the past in Rutu Modan’s The Property

Abstract

In this paper, we study Rutu Modan’s graphic novel, The Property (Ha-Nekhes in Hebrew), as a work which engages in a double exploration. First, we show how the story of Mica and her grandmother, who travel to Poland to reclaim a property lost in the Holocaust, is used by Modan to reflect on her medium and the artistic means it offers such as colour, speech balloons and onomatopoeic icons. Second, we analyse her self-conscious use of the toolkit of the comics artist to reflect on the past and its impact on the present. We investigate her conception of the past as a multilayered story, which consists of several individual stories that complement but also contest with each other, insinuating that there is no one authoritative version of the past. Finally, we argue that beyond the individual stories there are emotionally and politically charged national conflicts, which Modan evokes without referring to them directly. Our analysis sheds light on both the uniqueness of her work and the way it relates to other media texts which deal with similar topics.

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Rutu Modan for the permission to include illustrations from The Property in this article.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

[1] The version referred to in this article is the English one.

[2] Michael Kovner describes a similar process in creating the graphic novel Ezekiel’s World (Kovner 2015); see Weissbrod and Kohn (2019, 122).

[3] Captioned comics which were common in the past are still preferred by some artists (Lefèvre 2006). In Ezekiel’s World (Kovner 2015), Kovner refrained from using speech bubbles because he thought they would interfere with the composition of the pictures (Weissbrod and Kohn 2019, 115–146).

[4] The Photoplasticon was a popular device at the turn of the twentieth century that allowed viewers to see changing three-dimensional photographs. The Warsaw Photoplasticon currently operates as a museum. See: https://warsawtour.pl/en/warsaw-photoplasticon/ (accessed 1 February 2021)

[5] Such considerations led to the censoring of some parts of Anne Frank’s diary; see Weissbrod and Kohn (2020).

[6] Many bibliographical sources deal separately with the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising and the 1944 Warsaw uprising. References to both can be found, e.g., in Białoszewski (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ayelet Kohn

Ayelet Kohn is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication at David Yellin Academic College in Jerusalem. Her research focuses on multimodality in media texts and on communities in the internet. She has published in Visual Communication, Visual Studies, Computers in Human Behavior, Jewish Quarterly Review, Journal of Israeli History, Social Semiotics, Convergence and more. Her latest book, coauthored with Rachel Weissbrod, Translating the Visual: A Multimodal Perspective, was published with Routledge, in 2019.

RACHEL Weissbrod

Rachel Weissbrod is full professor at the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, Bar-Ilan University. Her areas of research include translation theory, literary translation into Hebrew, audiovisual translation and adaptation. She has published inTarget, The Translator, Meta, Babel, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance and more. Her book Not by Word Alone – Fundamental Issues in Translation (in Hebrew) was published by the Open University of Israel in 2007. Her latest book, Translating the Visual: A Multimodal Perspective, coauthored with Ayelet Kohn, was published by Routledge in 2019.