Annual No.14: Educator/Illustrator of the Year: Rutu Modan

Interview with Rutu Modan

**Tell us a bit about your background, were you always interested in illustration?**

You might say it started in kindergarten when I was four or five years old. I would often dictate the text to my teacher for my drawings. There has always been text with my drawings. Drawing for me means, even at that early age, to tell a story. I loved picture books so much that in junior high school I secretly signed up my little sister to the kids’s public library so I could continue to look at picture books.

On the other hand, I didn’t think then, of illustration as my future profession. I planned to be an Arctic explorer. My typical Jewish parents expected me to be a doctor, of course. More precisely, as my father used to say “With good hands like yours you’ll be a great plastic surgeon.” It was only in my early 20s that I decided to go to art school and even then it took some time until I realized that I can actually work doing what I did as a child.

**What prompted you to become a comics artist?**

Comics weren’t popular in Israel when I was young. I think Israel is the only country in the world where Tintin, Superman and Asterix were commercial failures. There was a comic strip in the children’s magazine from time to time, one Tintin book published by a brave publisher, a few Tex comics in my dentist’s reception room and one political comic artist in the newspaper my dad read—that was about it. But I loved comics whenever I saw them, but it was so sporadic that I couldn’t identify it as something I could do.
In my third year at the art academy, my illustration teacher, Michel Kishka, an immigrant from Belgium and one of Israel’s few comics artists initiated the first comics course; I was one of the six students who chose his class. On the first day he brought in his wonderful comics collection, piled the books on the tables, and said: “Just read.” It was the first time I saw Watchmen, Edward Gorey, Robert Crumb and Aline Kominksy-Crumb, Raw magazine and many others. It was culture shock; I was falling in love. By the end of the class, I had decided to become a comics artist. Three month later I already had a strip in a local newspaper and I’ve never stopped making comics since.

**Which comes first, the text or the images? **

The text, always. I write everything down first. The next stage is making a rough but complete storyboard. Then I take photographs for reference and only then do I decide on the style. The next step is to start making sketches for the characters and only then start drawing. I’m quite rigid about this process. An image can provoke or motivate a story, but even then I write the text first.

*How hard was it for you to enter the field?**

Actually, I was lucky. The 90s were a good time to start an illustration career in Israel. A new generation of young, enthusiastic editors changed what was the extremely conservative approach both in style and content. There were suddenly a lot of new magazines, supplements, local editions etc. Illustrations, which were rarely used before in newspapers, were considered hip and innovative—and they were also cheaper to commission than photographs though I never understood why. The atmosphere was like a revolution, so any crazy idea was good enough to give it a try. And because there were so many new supplements, there were spaces to fill up. It literally seemed like all I had to do to get a comics strip was to suggest one, so I did. And since I was considered part of the editorial staff the editors gave me illustration assignments as well. When the boom was over, after few years the editors went back to thinking in more practical terms, I was already fairly well established as an editorial illustrator and comics artist.

**What artists influenced you?**

A Wow, so many. Hergé, Daniel Clowes, Art Spiegelman, Tove Jansson, Tomi Ungerer, Saul Steinberg, Winsor McCay, Batia Kolton, Anke Fuechtenberger are a few names that come to my mind, but there were, and are, so many more. But it’s not necessarily the style or the technique that influences me. It can be the storytelling or the approach to composition. For instance, Art Spiegelman’s influence on me was mostly the myriad of possibilities he showed to use the medium to tell any type of story.
And it’s not only comics artist that I’m influenced by, but also filmmakers, authors, painters, even dancers. I’m not afraid of being influenced, it’s basically learning from others. What’s most important though is to know who to learn from.

**Tell us about your Mad magazine experience.**

In the early 90s Mad was selling the rights to international publishers. The format was supposed to be 75% American material and the rest to be commissioned from local artists. An Israeli publisher, who happened to be my uncle, liked comics and decided it was time to make them popular and so he bought the Hebrew rights. My good friend, the comics artist Yirmi Pinkus, and I were asked to be the co-editors. We did everything from choosing the Mad material—all their archive, from any year was open to us— translating, printing, and the best part, commissioning work from all our friends.
It was a great fun but a commercial disaster.
You see the main problem was we wanted to publish Raw magazine rather than Mad magazine. The Israeli work we commissioned were alternative comics. Mad’s fans hated the local work, alternative comics’ fans hated the Mad part. Nobody bought it. After ten issues the project was canceled.
On the other hand, it was great for understanding the difference between making art and selling it.

**Why did you feel the need to initiate the publishing collective, Actus Tragicus?**

After we failed with Mad, Yirmi and I decided that if creating comics meant losing money, we better lose it doing exactly what we want to do.
There were three artists in the collective beside Yirmi and me: Batia Kolton, Itzik Rennert and Mira Friedmann. Between 1996–2008 we published a comics project almost every year. But no bookshop in Israel was willing to sell our books—at that time there were no comics shops in the country, now there are two—so we created events of alternative culture: comics, indie music labels etc. which soon became “the way” to sell comics for other artists as well.
To reach a wider audience, we published our books in English and distributed the comics abroad through comics festivals in Europe and the US.
Our plan for Actus was to become an independent comics publishing house but it eventually became more than that for us. Creating comics is a lonely job, usually. Actus became like a support group. We admired each other work enough to criticize and to help one another grow. Even though it never became huge, commercially speaking, I consider Actus my most important and influential project.

**Where do your story ideas come from?**

The news, documentaries, family stories, gossip, eavesdropping at queues. The next good idea can be anywhere, so it’s important to always be on the watch to catch it.
Most ideas pop up when I’m half a sleep. If it wakes me up, and I cannot go back to sleep there’s a good chance it’s exciting enough to keep me, at least interested long enough for the days, months, years it will take me to complete the comics.

**There’s quite a bit of dark humor in your work, why is that a central theme in your projects?**

It’s well known that humor is a great tool for coping with terrible things and black humor, for coping with the tragic. Unfortunately, in life there’s never a shortage of either.
I always find there’s a funny side, even if only the gap between the pomposity of our feelings and the indifference of the daily routine. It’s just the way I look at the world.
The roots could come from the fact that I grew up in a hospital. We lived in a small neighborhood inside the hospital area, a safe zone. Everyone’s parents were doctors or nurses. Our parents worked long hours and we were left alone from a very young age. It seems the grown-ups never thought there were things you should hide from kids. I used to come to visit my mom after school walking through all the departments where there were things a child is not supposed to see. During the 1973 war, helicopters brought wounded soldiers from the front landing on the field where we were playing ball. We even built tree houses from the boards of coffins. As kids we didn’t consider it frightening or extreme, it was just everyday reality. Looking back, it might have had some influence on my work, after all there’s always a dead person in the story.

**Do you feel your comics make a political statement?**

I’m not interested in using comics to make statements of any kind. If I tell a story in order to make a statement then I have to bend everything in the story to correlate with it. That’s a certain way to kill a story and turn it into a manifesto. Besides, statements are too decisive, they have to be or what’s the point?
In my stories, I try to show my point-of-view which is that nothing is ever clear, nothing is simple and that it’s often impossible to decide what is good and what is bad. Don’t worry I do have political opinions, which I believe are better than anyone else’s, but I’ve never met anyone who changed his/her opinion because of a sticker. On the other hand, my current opinions were definitely heavily influenced by honest, interesting, eye opening stories.

**How has illustration and comics changed in Israel since you were in school?**

There’s been a huge change but there’s still a lot to be done. There are many active, wonderful comics artists, unfortunately most are self-published. Some of the more established publishers started translating comics and few Israeli comics books have been published but they’re mostly children’s comics. What has changed a lot is the attitude towards comics. Today if you say you’re a comics artist the reaction is usually “cool” rather than “what does it mean?”
In the children’s books market, publishers are more daring and open to new styles than they used to be. It’s also easier for a young artist to be hired to illustrate a book. It took me seven years after art school before a publisher gave me that chance Most thought my illustrations would frighten the kids—I refused to draw blonde-haired, widely-smiling faces. As for the editorial illustration market, like in the rest of the world, it’s shrinking.
Having said that though I believe the illustration scene in Israel is one of the best in the world, if not financially at least in the quantity of illustrators and in the quality of their work.

**Let’s talk about your experiences as a teacher, how long have you been teaching? **

I’ve been teaching for twenty-three years now. I started teaching an editorial illustration course in a private design school in Tel Aviv. But since 1999 I’ve taught comics, children’s books illustration and foundation classes at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem. I used to teach editorial illustration at Bezalel as well, but that’s not a separate course anymore.

**What do you feel the role of an instructor is?**

The main thing is that I try to make students love illustration and comics as much as I do. In the past I thought that my goal was to teach my students how to draw: composition, coloring, styling and so on. I’m still doing that of course but my ambition is to help them discover how and what they want to draw and say.
That’s more complicated and even frightening because I have to trust the student and doubt myself more, and be able to fail and watch the student fail. It’s less instructing and more like handing the tools to a workman while he’s doing his thing.

**How are you able to juggle teaching and your work?**

A Easy answer, sleeping six hours a night instead of eight adds one working day to the week. More seriously, sometimes the juggling is difficult but it’s like having both a career and a family, to give one of them up is unthinkable.
Most of the time I don’t separate teaching and work. They support and enrich each other. And honestly, it’s nice to have a break from the studio, to go out and deal with my students’ artistic problem rather than dealing with my own. Other people’s problems are always much simpler to solve.

**What is your advice to graduates entering the field today?**

Always have a personal project besides commissioned work. Commercial illustration can be a lot of fun, you are like an image-detective trying to solve problems. But at the same time you are being told what to do and that can be frustrating. So if you have your own personal project, no matter if it will be published or not, you’re like a king doing exactly what you want. These project are the ones that usually take you to your next level, which impacts your paid work as well. Even if it doesn’t at least you’re having fun. Fun is very important.
And calm your parents down. Everything will be fine, you will not starve to death. Tell them I said so.

**Final words to teachers?**

Remind the students from time to time that they love to draw—sometimes they are so stressed they forget that.
And share with them your difficulties and failures so they’ll know learning doesn’t end when they get their degree. One student once said to me: “Something is wrong. I’m in my 4th year and it’s still so difficult!” I told him that as long as you want to become better, creating will always be difficult. It’s easy only if you continue doing what you’ve already done, but then it’s also boring. If you suffer, that means you’re on the right track.

**And finally, what’s in your future, personally and professionally?**

A I’m working on a new graphic novel at the moment and afterwards a children’s book, I already have the text ready.
As for teaching, the Bezalel Academy just opened a visual communication graduate program, the first program of its kind in Israel, and I’m going to teach there. The program is emphasizing the multidisciplinary aspect of visual communication. I’ll be teaching how to apply the principals of illustration and storytelling not only to illustrators, but also designers from other disciplines. At the same time, I’m sure to encounter new ways of thinking that will affect illustrators in the program and their projects. Anyway, it’s a new challenge and I’m already looking forward to it.