The second collection of Israeli cartoonist Asaf Hanuka’s autobiographical comics finally gets an English translation. Does it prove valuable enough to have been translated? Read on to find out.
Written and Illustrated by Asaf HanukaCover by Asaf Hanuka
Translated by Yardenne Greenspan
Lettered by Deron BennettThe Realist: Plug and Play continues the journey of the Eisner-Award winning, husband, father, and ordinary Israeli citizen Asaf Hanuka (The Divine) as he plumbs the depths of human existence with humor and melancholy, imagination, and quiet desperation. This new volume of the series brings the mix of pathos and politics that makes Hanuka a modern master of cartooning.
My only prior experience to Hanuka’s work was in his art contributions to Waltz with Bashir, which I wasn’t aware he contributed to until I started researching for this review. So, I went into this book completely blind. For those in a similar situation, “The Realist: Plug and Play” collects Hanuka’s weekly contributions to Israeli business newspaper “The Calcalist.” Other than one six-page story at the beginning, the book is composed entirely of single-page strips, most of which are either nine-panel musings or full-page illustrations.
Some strips highlight an ordinary moment, like a simple, quick, terrifying bedtime conversation about mortality between Hanuka and his wife. Others tackle a more conceptual topic, where the illustrations serve to represent the concepts discussed. Other strips mix a realistic situation, which he likely went through when he made it, with a surreal action, which is likely how he felt in the situation. These were the most interesting to me. It’s not uncommon to see Hanuka, for instance, kicking his own head around like a soccer ball, or walking with a literal knife in his back as he contemplates raising his children in an area with less geopolitical strife.
The nine-panel pages are typically illustrated according to the words captioned at the bottom of each panel. Because of this, and because of the corresponding lack of word balloons in most strips, “The Realist: Plug and Play” takes on a much more introspective outsider perspective than most other comics, which throw you directly into the action. Hanuka plays with this structure, sometimes filling each panel with the same image which has been only slightly altered and sometimes setting up his nine panels where the three panels in each row mirror the ones directly above and below them. He also uses color to enhance his point in each strip, like how the background on a page where he slowly melts from the summer heat starts yellow and goes through various shades of orange before the red final panel.
The full-page strips are an entirely different entity, yet they are equally as diverse. They tend to work similar to the way comic book covers do, as a single bold illustration that itself tells a story. One of my favorites shows Hanuka with his back to us, holding grocery bags and looking out from a paved walkway at a pack of military men running to their next destination. In this image, it’s the details that speak the most: Hanuka’s shoulders and head are slouched the tiniest bit; a bit of milk spills out of the bag, which a cat licks up; Hanuka stands in a purple shadow looking out at the white city and blue sky, with the solid line of green and brown military men completely blocking his path. With only a three-word caption, “Under your nose,” he captures just as much about life in Tel Aviv as with any of his word-heavy musing pages.
Not every full-page illustration in “The Realist: Plug and Play” is as serious as this, though. Some go for comedy, like a page where Hanuka’s daughter screams at him for ice cream while out on a walk in the park, prompting the beasts from Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” to watch from the bushes. Another page earlier in the book shows Hanuka flying above the city as a superhero with a towel for a cape, holding his daughter as her open mouth unleashes a large green ray down below. The caption? “Burp-Man: The Return of the Virus.”
Taken individually, everything works well. Taken as a whole, however, the book becomes something much different. Structurally, the visual poetry of the nine-panel pages contrasts well with the full-page strips, giving a break between meditations. The comedic strips are also interspersed well so that the overall variety of material keeps anything from getting repetitive.
Continued belowContent-wise, though, the whole of “The Realist: Plug and Play” provides a wonderful look into the psyche of a father trying to balance a career and family life in the midst of societal conflict which is far beyond him. Pages explicitly about the nation’s conflict, like the one titled “Summer in Tel Aviv” about the family out for a walk as dozens of missiles and knives narrowly miss them, color the normal pages about more domestic scenarios. In reading everything together, I also got a fuller view of Hanuka’s dichotomous personal identity. He’s both Jewish by heritage and secular by choice; he has Mizrahi heritage but wasn’t aware of his family background until it was too late to embrace the culture; he feels like a target for terrorists for being Jewish, yet feels like a target to be labeled as a terrorist because he’s an Arab. This all only gets pieced together after reading many strips, and every time I got more personal details, I felt like his other pages had greater meaning.
Overall, my first exposure to “The Realist” and Asaf Hanuka’s work immediately made me a fan. He’s a master of visual storytelling, using different structures to explore a variety of concepts in wildly different ways. The book as a whole also has a cumulative effect in which each individual page works together to provide a full-bodied portrait of a normal life in a situation where that life is constantly threatened by forces outside of their control.
Final Verdict: 9.3 – An inspired mixture of the real and the surreal, Asaf Hanuka’s collection of his thought-provoking comic strips end up being far greater than the sum of their parts.
