Silence in a 9-panel grid: the voice of Israeliness in Asaf Hanuka’s The Realist

Asaf Hanuka’s autobiographical comic strips collected into one album, The Realist, chronicle everyday episodes in the life of a young Israeli family. The silent nature of many of the panels brings forth the gap between the idea and the praxis. We investigate silence in relation to both genre and Israeliness in order to examine what silence promotes and to what extent it serves the narrative better than sound or words when generating criticism, displaying helplessness, coping with traumatic events, etc. Our six case studies are conducted in the framework of both silence theories and multimodal discourse theories.