Happy End

by Rutu Modan, Itzik Rennert, Batia Kolton

Everybody wishes for happy endings, but even if you're lucky enough to have one, happy endings are hardly ever what you expect. In their newest and most irresistible book, the Actus artists and their special guest, the German illustrator Anke Feuchtenberger present six graphic novellas with interesting twists on the "Happy End."

Genres: Israel, Comics

188 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2002

About the author

Rutu Modan (Hebrew: רותו מודן) was born in Tel-Aviv in 1966. In 1992 she graduated cum laude from the illustration program at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Shortly after graduating, she began regularly writing and illustrating comic strips and stories for Israel's leading daily newspapers, as well as editing the Israeli edition of MAD magazine with Yirmi Pinkus. Together, they founded Actus Tragicus, an internationally acclaimed collective and independent publishing house for alternative comic artists, in 1995. The following year she collaborated with Israeli author Etgar Keret on her first graphic novel, Nobody Said it Was Going to Be Fun, an Israeli bestseller. Rutu has worked as an illustrator for magazines and books in Israel and abroad, with illustrations published in The New York Times, New Yorker and Le Monde, among many other renowned publications.

She has received much recognition for her work, including four Best Illustrated Children's Book Awards from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. The Israel Ministry of Culture named Rutu Modan the Young Artist of the Year in 1997, and she was one of the contributors to the Eisner-Nominated Actus Tragicus anthology Jet Lag in 1999. In 2001 she won the Andersen Award for Illustration from the International Board on Books for Young People in Basel, Switzerland, and was nominated for the Ignatz Award for Best Story and Promising New Talent for her story "Bygone" in Flipper, Vol. 2 (Actus Tragicus / Top Shelf.) She has been a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation since 2005, and in 2006 she was nominated for the Angoulême Festival's Goccini Award, granted to a scriptwriter whose past year's work deserves special praise.

Reviews

[Jan Philipzig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Contemporary Comics from Israel

Actus is a group of five Israeli comic-book creators that was founded by Rutu Modan and Yirmi Pinkus in 1995, and later rounded out by Batia Kolton, Itzik Rennert, and Mira Friedmann. This beautifully produced little volume features one distinct and visually stunning contribution from each of them, plus a rather nightmarish sixth tale about a girl's passage into the netherworld by German guest artist Anke Feuchtenberger.

One of my two favorites was Rutu Modan's "The Homecoming," the story of a mysterious plane that circles over the beach of a small Israeli town until it is shot down as a terrorist threat - it may or may not actually have carried a long-lost Israeli soldier, husband, and son. The other contribution that impressed me for quite different reasons was Yirmi Pinkus' "Entertaining Gerda," which is about a bored and disillusioned couple whose relationship is unexpectedly revitalized by the discovery that a neighbor spies on them: as they feel obligated to entertain the spying neighbor, they rediscover their long-forgotten passions.

Every story is rigidly structured in the sense that it limits itself to only one panel per page, and each panel is carefully designed and elaborately illustrated. The result feels almost museum-like, though such high-brow connotations are undermined by the rather recalcitrant humor the authors find in serious topics such as isolation, violence, repression, and death.

[Tiffanie Pirault · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed reading this collection from different artists. Pretty weird! Pretty fun!