Dudu Geva was always good with names. They seemed to come as effortlessly to him as his drawings, from "Joseph and His Brothers," to "The Road to Happiness" and, of course, "The Song of the Duck." The last project he was working on before his sudden death in February 2005 - creation of some kind of journal or a cheap booklet of comics - did not come to fruition, but at least it lent its perfect Dudu Geva-esque name to a new exhibition of his work, entitled "The Meaning of Life."

The retrospective, which opened last week at the Nahum Gutman Museum in the Neveh Tzedek neighborhood of Tel Aviv, tries to carry off a nearly impossible mission by assembling under one roof Geva's artwork and his projects, to offer viewers a look at work that seems so close and familiar yet, at the same time, so surprising and boundless.

Geva, who was always known as Dudu and never as David, so Israeli even in his name, is considered by many to be the founding father of the Israeli comics culture.

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"Geva's line was without a doubt one based on the Israeli ethos," says Ro'i Rosen, an artist, writer and comics creator, who holds Geva in profound esteem. "He not only left a mark on the culture, he also influenced many artists. I'm currently teaching a course in Japanese culture and there, alongside Murakami, Mariko Mori and many other museum artists, are the artists of the manga and the nitei (comics and animation). It's clear that art that comes from the area of popular culture can be just as good as fine art. It doesn't need a museum's seal of approval."

"The Meaning of Life," curated by Tali Tamir, is accompanied by a book of the same name (published by Keter Press, and partially funded by the Payis Council for Culture and Art). The book is very well designed and not one of those weighty memorial tomes. It tries to offer a sampling of Geva's wide-ranging and dynamic work, and an idea of his thousands of drawings, texts and sketches - only some of which are represented in the book and in the exhibition. Along with short stories by Geva, about a dozen writers describe different aspects of his work over the years: the Jerusalem era, the various groups he was a part of, the little man, the daily life of a clerk in the urban jungle, the loser-hero who is the antithesis to the all-powerful Supermans and Batmans, the adolescent masculinity, the (lost) Ashkenazi Jew, the unclear connection between comics and art, and more.

Confusing? Not necessarily. "If there's one thing that characterizes a unique artist, it's an image that can't be erased from one's consciousness," says Rosen. "A good artist creates an image that refuses to fade, an image that can be admired or criticized but not forgotten. Geva's character of Joseph, with his cactus and his light, and his duck, of course, certainly meet these criteria. Geva had this rare ability to distill a character. And if a modernist artist is perceived as one who redefines the boundaries of the medium, then his weekly comic strip in the newspaper meets this standard code: He created new meanings for the comic strip. For me, personally, especially when I was younger, his presence on the bookshelf was very important. It was a bridge for me between fields that at the time seemed to me to be unconnected: art and comics, humor and politics. And he did it in such a way that it wasn't relegated to the margins of the page, as was usually the case with caricatures in the newspapers."

The editors of the book that goes with the exhibition, Tamir and Tzipa Kampinsky, insist that the exhibition and the book do not seek in any way to sum up Geva's work. On the contrary, the objective is to start a discussion, "to spark a process of analytical observation of his body of work." They wish to redeem Geva the artist and do his work historical justice. Because while Geva left behind a tremendous and unique, even fantastic, project, and a body of work that grew steadily over the years - the whole thing appears to totter on the legs of, well, a duck.

"Sometimes the duck swallowed him up," says Eran Wolkowski, the graphics editor of Haaretz and an artist and illustrator who, though not a close friend of Geva's, spent many hours working with him at the Kol Ha'ir weekly in Jerusalem and then at Tel Aviv's weekly Ha'ir, the now-defunct Hadashot paper and Haaretz. "He created a kind of trademark that you could anything with. I thought it was too easy, and I say that knowing that, behind it, there was a genius in terms of intuition."

Why did he get so hooked on the duck?

Wolkowski: "He didn't have any grandiose plan to conquer the world with the duck, but it took over anyway. Granted, the duck was a continuation of Yosef's loserness, but to me it seemed too little, too small. I said to Dudu: 'There are other parts of you that don't live by this ducky neurosis.' He became addicted to this duck as something that represented him totally. Maybe because he was tired, maybe because he felt it was a safe environment. The media loved the duck. It suits the media. Even though I work in that field, I don't admire it that much. Dudu thought of it as a work environment."

Geva, whose sudden death came at age 55, was a prolific, tireless, frenetic artist. He published comic books, alone and together with other writers and artists; he published classic illustrated children's books and other stories that at first glance seemed intended for children, but upon further exploration turned out to be something else; he published and collected cheap, independent comic books by himself and others; he illustrated articles and covers for newspapers, supplied political caricatures, insisted on doing daily and weekly strips and one-panel comics, and when there was space, supplied whole pages of comics and special projects; he put out posters, and also tried his hand at animation.

"It's very important to mention that alongside his seemingly sloppy appearance, he really had excellent taste, in the physical, concrete, visual sense," says Wolkowski. "He knew how to put things next to each other, to identify things ... He was a wonderful curator of culture."

Because Geva was always displaying his work - it seemed that apart from the daily Yedioth Ahronoth, he'd worked for every other newspaper - we might have stopped really seeing it at some point. To a casual observer, it seemed that there was no such thing as a hidden Geva that had to be deeply excavated in order to be revealed.

Rosen: "Comics artists are more compulsive. They have a different ethos, a great productivity that comes with different standards and moves to a different tempo. It's a dizzying pace of creation that derives from horror vacui (fear of empty spaces)."

The Geva-created universe, with all its characters and texts and stories - along with the persona that he invented - while very attractive and charming in many ways, was also off-putting to a degree. Geva, for example, was always surrounded by a "gang." In this, too, he was as Israeli as can be. It was an all-embracing, protective and admiring group of friends, themselves witty writers and artists, mostly from the field of journalism. This helped him develop the image that he carefully and consistently nurtured: of the "hick" from Jerusalem, the international expert on hummus, the non-intellectual, who has no patience for art criticism and elitism, the eternal and chronically horny guy who can easily draw countless big-breasted blondes. This image, in tandem with the thoroughly uncritical cult of Geva-worship, fixed him in the general consciousness as the talented wild-child, the mischievous anarchist who's always nice to everyone.

"He had a spontaneity and flow, a tremendous intensity, he understood forms of texts and forms in general, he understood the energy of Tel Aviv, but I don't think that he had a position," says Wolkowski. "It bothered me that the alternative that he proposed was a youth-movement alternative. He had a lot of talent, excellent verbal talent and dramatic talent, a talent to create dialogues, to produce excellent work, but he'd always escape to the next publisher, to the gang and attempts to be funny. What was missing for me was the analytical dimension, the dimension that breaks down and builds up and locates things, what the artist Yair Garbuz calls the 'intellectual' dimension. You can't suffice with the embrace of the 'gang' - 'Great work, terrific,' and so on.

"His political stance, or the parody, was often vague. It was kind of like a general 'sons-of-bitches against the rich,' the pigs, not against anything specific. Against some undefined super-structure. But I think that he was a genius in his field. As soon as he touched the paper it came out well. And with the depictions of Joseph and the town, that were a continuation of Efraim Kishon, you get these endless corridors of bureaucracy. He was a genius in terms of his ability to construct this universe, but his anti-intellectualism was problematic. Very superficial. He was afraid of art that's a little enigmatic."

One could say that a sort of veil was created by the artist and his partners, and perhaps this is what prevented the two country's largest museums - the Tel Aviv Museum and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem - from mounting a serious, major exhibition of Geva's work. Not that this absolves them of the sins of laziness, shortsightedness and, above all, the inability to deal with works that contain humor. Is Geva too dangerous for a museum? Could he take a bite out of the kitschy pathos-filled works of Michal Rovner, for instance? Not for his sake should the doors of our temples of art be opened, but for our sake, and for their sake.

"What's the difference between a mural that a person creates on the walls of a white cube, and drawings for print?" asks Rosen. "It's a sign of the poverty of the big museums that they couldn't curate an exhibition for Geva."

There are so many issues to examine in Geva's powerful drawings: the place of the industrial production line (the printing) vis-a-vis the work of drawing; the virtuosity of the light; the pantomime of the line, of the characters, of the expressions; the relations between the text and the image, and between the voices and sounds and their visual-textual realization; the fonts and the balloons, the panels, how order is created. Above all, Geva's work raises the issue that touches on the most basic question of what art is: How does he, with the simplest, most modest and cheap tools - pens, pencils, sometimes paintbrushes, acrylic or watercolor paints, markers, a little collage - so quickly create a whole world that didn't exist before?

"He had an amazing way of working with the conscious cliches of the comics," Wolkowski explains. "It's a whole culture. He was a virtuoso in terms of his line, and over time he reduced it in a classic process to a thin and childish line. I saw him construct a three-dimensional character with depth, based on anatomy. He had an enviable ability to sketch very quickly. I admired his skills, sitting next to him and watching how he did it. He had an ability, like that of Joseph Lada [illustrator of "The Good Soldier Schweik"], to convey grotesqueness."

Geva's story presents a golden opportunity to try to understand the art of the comics. "If I had to place him in the context of international comics," says Rosen, "then what comes to mind is the alternative, rough comics of Art Spiegelman and Robert Crumb. The line isn't similar, but the spirit is, the alternative spirit that he tried to create."

Geva's connections to the Israeli traditions of illustration and caricature are also worthy of a deeper look. "He was charmed and influenced by Shimon Tzabar, as he himself attested," says Wolkowski. "To me, he was his heir, his successor. Like Tzabar, he started out in an anti-establishment newspaper, Ha'olam Hazeh, and adopted the slender line. How does he do it, I'd ask myself. The freedom with which he makes this a hotdog and this a shoe. [Cartoonist/illustrator] Amos Biderman or I would study a photo of a shoe for a long time to see how the lace comes out. In the end, little by little, I was influenced by [Geva]. I stopped going into the little details."