Echoes of October is built around a simple yet difficult question. The sort of question that children often ask and adults wish they could answer.
Why can’t we just get along?
That question is asked around the world in many ways and many languages. Yet it has taken on a particular vibrancy within the Middle East and especially regarding the Gaza conflict. This is the focal point of Echoes in October, which builds to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The story is told through the eyes of four children. All of them are 11 years old, but all of them were born of drastically different circumstances. Jannah is a Muslim girl from Gaza City. Amir is a Druze boy from Daliyat-al-Karmel. Lily is a Canadian Evangelical Christian, born in Toronto but recently relocated to Kibbut Kfar Aza. Eli is a Jewish boy from Tel Aviv. The children do not meet as a group over the course of the novel, though Eli and Amir are cousins. Lily and Jannah also meet briefly, as Lily’s father works as a volunteer driver who escorts Jannah into Israel for medical treatment.
However, despite its setting, Echoes of October plays out as a slice-of-life comic rather than a political thriller. The story remains firmly focused upon the children and their individual issues. This drives home their common ground and makes them more relatable to the young readers for who Echoes of October was written.
Eli, for instance, is worried about his parents talk of moving away from Israel. Their only concern is the safety of their family and what the threat of war may do to Eli. Yet Eli’s biggest fear is moving away from his friends, his school, and everything he knows. This is counterbalanced by the story of Lily, who has already undergone this trauma. She misses her friends in Canada and worries that her dream of being the next Taylor Swift may be short-circuited by moving halfway around the world.
Amir, an aspiring comic creator, has similarly big dreams of creating the first Druze superhero – a Captain America figure modeled on his soldier father. Unfortunately, most of his family have no use for his art and intend to put him to work in their restaurant instead of letting him continue school. Jannah also has issues with her family, for she has dreams of becoming a politician and bringing peace to the region so the people around her can be happy. Unfortunately, the people calling for violence on both sides are so much louder and so many refuse to listen to women, let alone girls.
Echoes of October does not pretend there are any easy answers. It does, however, offer one of the most heartfelt and well-structured introductions to the conflict in Gaza and how there is more than one side involved in the conflict. While the artwork and language used by Ami Adan are simple, they deliver a powerful idea that ultimately boils down to that one big question.
Why can’t we just get along?
Echoes of October is recommended by the author for readers 10 and up. This is a fair rating, as there is no objectionable content to be found here. Doubtless some will object to the idea of a children’s graphic novel that discusses the conflict in Gaza sight unseen. Yet this book is not entirely about that conflict. It is about four young people struggling to cling to some sense of normalcy in an increasingly angry world. That is something that all too many of us can related to in modern times and why I would recommend this graphic novel to readers of all ages rather than just children.
Echoes of October By Ami Adan Self-Published, 2025
Company Age Rating: 10+
NFNT Age Recommendation: Adult (18+), Older Teen (16-18), Teen (13-16), Tween (10-13) Creator Representation: Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, Character Representation: Canadian, Israeli, Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, Protestant ,
In the opening pages of The Realist, a young girl realizes that pet cats are not as compliant as stuffed animals and a high school boy experiences a class lecture from controversial Israeli professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz while simultaneously debating how to break up with his girlfriend. In this way, the commonplace and the existential entwine throughout the panels of this third collection of comics from Eisner winning cartoonist Asaf Hanuka.
Published by Archaia, The Realist: Last Day on Earth collects many of Hanuka’s weekly, autobiographical comic strips and cartoons, each delivered within a single page. The topics are wide ranging. As an Israeli artist grappling with life as a secular family amidst an often-religious society, Hanuka’s work deals a lot with politics, religion, and social issues. He recreates heated debates about Judaism with family members and displays consideration for the deeply engrained faith evident in the landscape around him, even as someone who does not necessarily believe the same. He reckons with a national situation rapidly changing, and often not for the better.
The collection never strays too far from the religious-political violence of Hanuka’s homeland, while some of his observations about modern politics find international relevance amidst the years of the Trump presidency and the coronavirus pandemic. Hanuka’s observations are sometimes precise and biting, other times esoteric, inviting deliberation rather than making a statement.
Though the global is a constant theme in The Realist, there is plenty of space in these pages for the personal as well. As Hanuka relates to his wife and raises two children, there are plenty of anecdotes about domestic life. He ruminates on trading bus trips for riding a scooter. He considers family vacations and what his life might have been if he had lived in a different city, a different country—the course of everything else spinning out from there. In the midst of it all, Hanuka contemplates what it means to be an artist, to be a human, in a world where such things are not always easy, nor do they always make sense. The resulting collection is global and personal, widely human and intimately personal to the man himself.
Depicting all these things, Hanuka’s work is realistically stylized, moving between grayscale and a wide range of colors, between carefully detailed scenes and characters navigating an uncertain void of possibility. The consistency of the visuals speaks to the creator’s depth of experience, deploying humor and exaggeration alongside more somber emotions as the scene requires. There is a solemn angst, a grief, running through much of the book, and Hanuka captures this quietly across the expressions on his characters faces, across each gesture and the sometimes fantastical scenarios and scenes he imagines to explain the concepts he is seeking to capture on the page.
In the end, I recognize that I am not the target audience for Hanuka’s work. Some of what he delivers here resonates clearly, while much of it is interesting but always with a level of inescapable distance from the lived reality he is describing to my vastly different life on another portion of the globe. Some readers will no-doubt enjoy crossing that divide for a time; others may struggle to remain engaged.
Aside from the occasional panel, there isn’t much content here that one might deem inappropriate, but the majority of The Realist is clearly aimed at adult readers interested in delving into the socio-political themes of Hanuka’s work as well as the reflections of a man who has experienced decades of life as an artist, a father, a husband, and a political commentator. For readers who enjoy more literary comics such as those typical of Drawn & Quarterly, as well as international cartoonists such as Chabouté, this compilation could certainly be worth picking up. And for any comics collection looking to expand to more literary and international offerings, The Realist: Last Day on Earth is definitely worthy of consideration.
The Realist: Last Day on Earth By Asaf Hanuka Abrams, 2022 ISBN: 9781684158379
NFNT Age Recommendation: Adult (18+) Creator Representation: Israeli,
The year is 1902 and nurse Jane Eyre is newly returned to London from the Boer War. After facing the horrors of combat in South Africa as a combat medic, Jane is having a hard time readjusting to civilian life, particularly regarding how society seems to think proper ladies should act. After years of having to do the work of a doctor in places where there was none, it is rough to be told you cannot do such things by men who have not seen what you have. Thankfully, Jane finds a sympathetic ear and kindred spirit in the Lady Estella Havisham, who helps Jane with another problem she is having – finding a suitable roommate.
Enter Irene Adler; an American and an actress, who is also in need of someone to help her pay the rent. Given Victorian London’s opinion of Americans and theatrical types, Jane is certain she and Irene will get along like a house on fire even before they meet. However, Irene is far more than a simple actress, living a double life that places her at war with both the respectable and unrespectable elements of society. Soon Jane finds herself drawn into Irene’s world and a conflict beyond imagining, as a foreign queen declares war on the British Empire for what they did to her nation and seeks the advanced science of Marie Curie to unleash a power undreamed of upon the world!
It is impossible to consider Adler without thinking of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. (Indeed, the advertising for Adler described it as “The League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen.”) While this is an easy comparison to make, it is also an unfair one, despite both series having the same base concept of taking characters from Victorian literature and putting them into a story together. While Moore’s central conceit was to devolve the superhero genre to its penny dreadful roots and tell a Victorian superhero story, Adler’s tale is closer in tone to the pulp fiction and weird science stories that dominated popular fiction in the early 20th century.
Adler also has a stronger focus on its characters, with Jane Eyre becoming the Dr. Watson to Irene Adler’s Sherlock Holmes, but getting a bit more to do than offer Irene someone to talk to when exposition needs to be delivered. Lavie Tidhar’s focus on the characters and commitment to adding complexity to their motivations is such that one even feels a certain degree of sympathy for the villain Ayesha (aka the Amazon queen from H. Rider Haggard’s She: A History of Adventure), who shows surprising nobility by freeing the captive performers of a freak show while in the middle of plotting to kill thousands of innocents. There are also hints of a romance between Ayesha and her chief assassin, the vampire Carmilla.
The artwork by Paul McCaffrey proves equally well-crafted. The many action sequences of the story are well-choreographed and flow freely and smoothly from panel to panel, guiding the reader along. The character designs are also worthy of note, as McCaffery makes all the characters look distinctive so there is no chance of confusing any of the cast.
Adler Vol 1 is aimed at audiences 12 and up and I consider that to be a fair rating. There is a bit of bloodshed, with realistic depictions of garroting, radiation poisoning and bullet wounds, but nothing inappropriate to a T-rated graphic novel. Many of the literary references may fly over the heads of the intended audience, but adults will find a lot to enjoy in Adler beyond picking out the nods to characters from The Prisoner of Zenda and The Amateur Cracksman.
Adler Vol. 01 By Lavie Tidhar Art by Paul McCaffrey Titan Comics, 2021 ISBN:9781782760719
Publisher Age Rating: 12+ Only
NFNT Age Recommendation: Older Teen (16-18), Teen (13-16) Creator Representation: Israeli, Jewish Character Representation: American, British, Central African, Lesbian,
“Two days after I killed myself, I found a job at some pizza joint called Kamikaze.” So starts Pizzeria Kamikaze, the graphic adaptation of Etgar Keret’s novella Kneller’sHappy Campers, which also served as the basis of the 2006 film Wristcutters: A Love Story.
The graphic novel, written by Keret and illustrated by Asaf Hanuka, is set in an afterlife for people who have taken their own lives. Mordy finds himself there after ending his own life, and discovers that the place reminds him of Tel Aviv rather than the beeping and floating in space he imagined it would be. After finding a job, a place to live, and a new friend named Uzi Gelfand, Mordy soon discovers that his girlfriend is also in the same place. Hoping to find her, Mordy convinces Uzi to accompany him in his search. Along the way, the friends pick up a hitchhiker named Leehee, who is trying to find the people in charge to explain to them that she is there by mistake. With a renewed purpose, the three head out in search of answers through the mysterious afterworld that’s as full of heartache, hope, and absurdity as the world it mirrors.
Just like with all Keret’s writings, this story contains elements of magical realism and dark humor, and is best suited for adult audiences. Political and social themes appear frequently in his writing, as is apparent when Uzi is reluctant to go to a neighborhood run by Arabs. Keret’s aim is to show that none of the socially created animosities matter in the end. At times it even seems that the resigned, despondent manner of the book’s characters suggests that not much really matters in the world he’s created. However, reading the story to the end shows that there is never a lack of things that matter, leading the book to the final hopeful conclusion it needed.
The artwork complements the story arc through expert use of color to show the emotions of its characters. The book starts with a gloomy, muted palette and the drawn in features of the characters. The unrealistic expectations of some of the characters are delineated with bright, blazing colors in some of the panels. In the end, the book concludes with the same muted palette, but there are patches of color here and there to show that any reality can include both light and dark, hope and despair.
As a standalone graphic adaptation, this would be a great addition to any adult graphic novel collection, and would appeal to fans of fantasy and horror such as Neil Gaiman’s Sandman books, as well as those looking for literary graphic novels.
Pizzeria Kamikaze by Etgar Keret Art by Asaf Hanuka ISBN: 9781684151196 Archaia, 2018
Echoes of October is built around a simple yet difficult question. The sort of question that children often ask and adults wish they could answer.
In the opening pages of The Realist, a young girl realizes that pet cats are not as compliant as stuffed animals and a high school boy experiences a class lecture from controversial Israeli professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz while simultaneously debating how to break up with his girlfriend. In this way, the commonplace and the existential entwine throughout the panels of this third collection of comics from Eisner winning cartoonist Asaf Hanuka.
“Two days after I killed myself, I found a job at some pizza joint called Kamikaze.” So starts Pizzeria Kamikaze, the graphic adaptation of Etgar Keret’s novella Kneller’s Happy Campers, which also served as the basis of the 2006 film Wristcutters: A Love Story.
