Streets of Rage [with Asaf Hanuka]
In Streets of Rage Etgar Keret and Assaf Hanuka create a world in which hopes are relentlessly dashed. Even when the anti-heroes dare to dream, they invariably forget about their aspirations or abandon them without a struggle. In the first story, the hero is sorry that his parents weren’t murdered when he was a child, and they never beat him: if they had, he might have been angry enough to become a prizefighter. In another story, the hero’s mother has just died of cancer and his father is off with every woman in sight in their Eilat hotel room. A spurt of raw anger is quickly stifled and the story ends with the hero just turning on the TV. Assaf Hanuka’s stark black and white drawings add drama to the innovative stories.
-
“ Unlike other graphic works, Streets of Rage is [not based on] a simple narrative, stereotyped characters, archetypal plots and verbal clichés. This is a multimedia work brimming with originality...Its most notable achievement is the convincing combination of text and illustration. ”
-
“ The use that Keret and Hanuka make of the graphic genre is not an external, technical one. They hark back to the basics of this genre in brilliant, creative ways, resulting in incisive, original illumination of the is-it-like-this―as-if―real world we live in. ”