Epileptic

Hailed by The Comics Journal as one of Europe’s most important and innovative comics artists, David B. has created a masterpiece in Epileptic, his stunning and emotionally resonant autobiography about growing up with an epileptic brother. Epileptic gathers together and makes available in English for the first time all six volumes of the internationally acclaimed graphic work.

David B. was born Pierre-François Beauchard in a small town near Orléans, France. He spent an idyllic early childhood playing with the neighborhood kids and, along with his older brother, Jean-Christophe, ganging up on his little sister, Florence. But their lives changed abruptly when Jean-Christophe was struck with epilepsy at age eleven. In search of a cure, their parents dragged the family to acupuncturists and magnetic therapists, to mediums and macrobiotic communes. But every new cure ended in disappointment as Jean-Christophe, after brief periods of remission, would only get worse.

Angry at his brother for abandoning him and at all the quacks who offered them false hope, Pierre-François learned to cope by drawing fantastically elaborate battle scenes, creating images that provide a fascinating window into his interior life. An honest and horrifying portrait of the disease and of the pain and fear it sowed in the family, Epileptic is also a moving depiction of one family’s intricate history. Through flashbacks, we are introduced to the stories of Pierre-François’s grandparents and we relive his grandfathers’ experiences in both World Wars. We follow Pierre-François through his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, all the while charting his complicated relationship with his brother and Jean-Christophe”s losing battle with epilepsy. Illustrated with beautiful and striking black-and-white images, Epileptic is as astonishing, intimate, and heartbreaking as the best literary memoir.


From the Hardcover edition.

The French cartoonist Pierre-François Beauchard (he changed his name to David B. as a teen-ager) had an unremarkable childhood in nineteen-sixties France, until his older brother, Jean-Christophe, began to have epileptic seizures. This graphic memoir depicts, with an admirable lack of sentimentality, how dealing with illness can become a power struggle as desperate and corrupting as that of war. The family's youngest child, Florence, attempts suicide; Pierre-François fantasizes about killing his brother; and Jean-Christophe's rages become increasingly unmanageable and violent. The Beauchards' futile quest for a cure takes them from surgeons to macrobiotic diets to spiritual mediums. David B. draws these potential solutions as totemic symbols, and, in one haunting panel, his mother is surrounded by their jeering, insistent forms. "So long as my mother hasn't tried every single one she'll be tormented by guilt," he writes.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

*Starred Review* Already published in Europe to great acclaim, this powerful graphic novel launches a series that promises to set an ambitious new standard for autobiographical comics. While centered on the author's brother Jean-Christophe's lifelong battle with epilepsy, the book tells the larger story of a troubled family undertaking a desperate odyssey to find a cure. Their peripatetic existence takes them throughout France as they desperately consult psychiatrists, join a Zen macrobiotic commune, resort to spiritualism, and finally consent to Jean-Christophe's institutionalization. The young David B. seeks solace in a vivid fantasy life, and the book's most visually spectacular passages depict his dreams, filled with mythical dream creatures portrayed in expansive panels reminiscent of Persian art. B.'s simple, economical drawing style--European comics artists don't share the American reluctance to apply a cartoonish look to serious stories--belies the work's structural complexities, such as flashbacks within the flashbacks to David's childhood. This journey through the wayward 1970s has universal appeal, such that many readers of this book will eagerly await learning where the subsequent decades took David B and his family. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

"A painfully honest examination of the effects of debilitating epilepsy on one man and his family, told through a combination of straightforward text and expressionist imagery that ranges in its palette from centuries-old symbolism to the secret worlds of childhood. Even as he shows up the hollow promises of every school of esoteric and alternative medicine his family encounters in their quest for help, David B. works a real kind of deeply human magic on the page-- something forged from black ink and a soul's struggle--that marks Epileptic as one of the first truly great narrative artworks of the new millennium."--Jason Lutes, author of Jar of Fools and Berlin

"David B has created a wildly beautiful fantasia on human frailty, on the making of an artist and the unmaking of his own brother -- a memoir that is hopeful and bitterly poignant all at once." -- Paul Collins, author of Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism

"David B.'s sprawling tale of his family, overrun by his brother's illness and obsessed with curing it, is a masterful depiction of people searching for answers when there may be none. David B. is clearly one of the best storytellers in the medium of comics."--Joe Sacco, author of The Fixer, Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde

"In Epileptic, the distortions of family life caused by his brother's illness are the cracked lens through which David B. explores on his own family's history and, by extension, the conflicts of 20th century France and even, to an extent, the world. The thing that makes this memoir unlike any ever seen before is the wonderful, inky, intricate artwork, and the way that allows us to enter into the story via the rich and angry fantasy life of a growing boy."--Jessica Abel, author of La Perdida, Mirror, Window and Soundtrack


From the Hardcover edition.

Now in paperback, the stunning, award-winning graphic memoir about growing up with an epileptic brother

"David B has created a wildly beautiful fantasia on human frailty, on the making of an artist and the unmaking of his own brother -- a memoir that is hopeful and bitterly poignant all at once." -- Paul Collins, author of Not Even Wrong: Adventures in Autism

David B. is a founding member of L’Association, a group of French cartoonists who banded together as publishers in 1990 and have revolutionized European comics with their groundbreaking approach to format, subject matter, and style. He has received many awards, including the French Alph’ Art award for comics excellence in 2000, and he was cited as European Cartoonist of the Year in 1998 by The Comics Journal. He lives in France.


From the Hardcover edition.

Illness may be of dubious use as metaphor, as Susan Sontag famously argued, but it's an even unlikelier theme for a comic book. By both origin and reputation, comics (or graphic novels, as one is now more or less obliged to call them) are the ultimate vessel of nerdy wish-fulfillment: blocky, oversaturated fantasy pieces in which everyday schmoes acquire superhuman powers and wreak righteous vengeance on their villainous tormentors. Probably the only reason that no comic villain has actually been a gym teacher is that comic artists feared that drawing men in shorts would only contribute to their pusillanimous image off the printed page.

So one of the many achievements of Epileptic -- the energetic, melancholy and candid graphic novel from the French godfather of the genre, David B. -- is the construction of a sort of upside-down comics narrative: It draws its momentum from the loss of strength and mental clarity and, most of all, the failure of would-be magical powers to remedy a horrible, incurable psychic and physical affliction.

On paper -- or, rather, in words -- Epileptic is a simple tale: a memoir of how David B. (born Pierre-Francois Beauchard) grows up as his older brother, Jean-Christophe, succumbs to steadily worsening fits of epilepsy, beginning at age 7. After the family's doctor diagnoses his first seizure -- and Jean-Christophe has a horrifying near-miss with a knife-happy neurosurgeon who wants to sever a "circumvolution" in the boy's brain -- the Beauchards spend the next 30 or so years desperately canvassing the fringes of the healing world for anyone who proposes a remedy. When a macrobiotic diet appears briefly to alleviate some of the symptoms, the family leaves its home near Orléans for a macrobiotic commune. In mounting desperation, the boys' mother starts soliciting advice from any and all ambitious thinkers -- even existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir -- but winds up in a frustrating succession of consultations with New Age healers: a Swedenborgian lecturer, a magnetist, a spiritualist. Nothing works; Jean-Christophe's fits periodically go into mild remission, but they always return, and gradually the boy fatalistically gives himself over to the debilitating effects of the disease. As he grows older, he becomes listless and bloated, and ends up moving in permanently with his parents after an abortive effort to study law in Paris. He also becomes delusional, reverting to a childhood fascination with totalitarian leaders like Hitler and Stalin; a drug meant to arrest his seizures triggers paranoid fantasies that his family is out to persecute or kill him.

David B., meanwhile, makes his own adjustments to his brother's malady by launching his career as an artist and narrator of lurid fantasy-style fiction. This is the real subject of Epileptic: a desperately pitched and self-consciously doomed struggle to use the rickety materials of storytelling to ward off the all-too-visible effects of an affliction that neither the adult world nor David B.'s childhood imagination can comprehend. "I had to draw and write constantly," David B. recalls. "I had to fill my time in order to prevent my brother's disease from reaching me." Without being entirely conscious of it, the young artist fuses the course of his brother's disease with his childhood visual obsessions -- drawing rampaging Mongol hordes and battalions of supernatural creatures, imagining his dead grandfather as an eerie oversized bird, touring the woods near his family home in the company of a trio of imaginary beings (a dead man, a magical cat and the devil) from a tale by the French writer Jean Ray. "If the whole world is going to reject us," he reasons, "then let this be my world."

The dark, antic panels of Epileptic render a richly allusive, harrowing and oddly redemptive world. Using stark, black-and-white, finely detailed ink images, David B. depicts his brother's disease as an unscalable mountain or an enormous serpent, and his own work as a suit of armor, keeping the epilepsy at bay -- a measure that "protects me, but . . . isolates me as well." Drawing on his family history, his adult relationships and -- most of all -- his frighteningly vivid dreams, David B. hurls all his imaginative resources at the insoluble riddle of his brother's illness. Near the end of Epileptic, he fantasizes to his brother, in traditional comics-hero mode: "I had this fantasy that if I climbed onto a horse I could find you, tear you away from this daily, recurring death, and carry you back to life." He doesn't, of course, and goes on to confess to his brother that because his life's work has been "to rekindle the delight we had as children, making books together," he now feels "never more alone than when I'm making a book." Yet the paradox of Epileptic's remarkable testament is that readers can appreciate anew how even an insistently self-devouring art like David B.'s can serve as a provisional bulwark against our most awful sorts of suffering and isolation. It is by no means a victory, but it is at least a restorative opening in the armor.

Reviewed by Chris Lehmann
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Chapter 1

1994. I’m in the bathroom, at my parents’ house in Olivet. It’s ... me ...

It takes a moment for me to recognize the guy who just walked in. It’s my brother.

It’s the first time I’ve seen him like this, without his public face on.

I didn’t know you’d lost your front teeth.

I got these fake teeth...

get in y’r way...

Don’t wanna...

There are scars all over his body. His eyebrows are criss-crossed by scabs.

He’s enormously bloated from medication and lack of exercise.

The back of his head is bald, from all the times he’s fallen.

Brush teeth ...

Go ahead, I’m done.

Brush... brush teeth...

All right, then... good night.

1964. I’m living in Orléans with my parents, my brother, and my sister. The Algerian War ended two years ago, but I’m not even aware of its occurrence yet. I do know that De Gaulle is the President of the Republic.

Florence age 4.

Pierre-François age 5. . Jean-Christophe age 7.

Every Sunday my dad takes us to mass. I’m bored stiff. I know every detail of the stained-glass windows.

When my parents aren’t around I play Joan of Arc with my sister and my brother.

Fifty-centime coins have a hole in the middle, at school my pen has a nib, at home I read "Vaillant" and "Le Journal de Pif" and my name is Pierre-François.

Fafou ! You coming!?

He loses a few baby teeth in the process.

So I play with my brother instead.

Of course, they don’t really under-stand our historical preoccupations.

I’m Joan of Arc !

At lunch, my father tells us stories from the Bible.

Those I do enjoy, especially when they involve fighting.

My mother, for her part, tells us about the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés.

That’s even better because it’s nothing but fighting.

At night, before we go to sleep, she reads us a passage from "Michel Strogoff" by Jules Verne.

The best thing about "Michel Strogoff" is the Tartars. They’re always on horseback, they’re bristling with weapons, and they kill everybody.

At night, the typhoons come for me. I fall asleep and in the mid-dle of the night, I’m carried off by whirlwinds.

And I find myself lost somewhere in my room, which has expanded during my sleep.

I walk for kilometers, feeling my way along a wall, without ever coming across anything familiar.

I’m assaulted by those nightly typhoons a number of times. And then it just stops.

Last night I was carried away by a typhoon.

I call out to Florence, who sleeps in the next room. She opens the door, I have a point of reference, and I find my way back to bed.

Me too !

Behind the house is the alleyway.

Several hundred yards worth of blacktop. Virtually never any cars. And the gang : our neighbor Pascal, and a pair of brothers, Richard and Vincent.

Hey ! There’s a robot in the warehouse !

We enter. I don’t like this one bit.

I know that’s a lie. I’ve been to the warehouse.

The owner’s son told me it was okay.

C’mon, let’s go play in the warehouse.

We aren’t supposed to!

Really?

Actually, it’s no fun at all. We’re on edge, uncomfortable. My brother seems to be look-ing out for something.

We start playing in a pile of sand in front of the warehouse.

The warehouse manager comes along.

WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TWO DOING HERE?

Come with me, you !

HERE ! You clean that up !

I cower in a corner, wondering how I’ll ever manage to get out without being seen.

Where’d he go ?

I fling myself into Chantal’s arms, crying.

I see the manager coming back with Chantal, my parents’ maid.

We go back to my parents’. Blood is pouring from my left hand.

The following day, I’m playing in our courtyard.

Fafou, don’t go anywhere; someone’s here to see you.

What happened to you ?

I b-broke... the... window...

I’m here to apologize to you for what happened yesterday.

He leaves immediately. My brother lured me into a trap and my parents let the monster into the house.

Suddenly he appears ! Looming over me ! It’s him !

That’s the worst part !

Oh...

A little later, workers come and tear down the warehouse. Jean-Christophe is disconsolate. I don’t give a shit.

Work progresses. We play on the motorcycle that belongs to Chantal’s boyfriend.

Vrmmm vrmmm vrmmmm mm...

I wanna ride it too !

Florence, go get Dad ! Hurry up !

Hey Tito, you playing dead ?

He’s heavy. It feels like I’ve been holding him up forever.

What’s wrong with Tito ?

He had a spell...

Hnnngggg... hnnnnggg...

Actually, I know what has happened.

But that’s bizarre ! I didn’t think typhoons came around in the daytime !

He got carried away by a typhoon -- I’m sure of it !

From now on I’ve gotta be really careful.

And thus begins the endless round of doctors, for my brother and my parents.

They go see our family doctor. He sends them to his teacher, who no longer practices.

His diagnosis reflects his hourly billing.

He sees them anyway. His diagnosis : epileptic seizures. He refers them to a Parisian neuropsychiatrist.

Ma’am, your son is a bad boy.

They come to the house and complain.

But we aren’t bad boys. With the gang, we throw rocks at the bums at the end of the street.

They busted one of our wine bottles.

That isn’t even true !

We also harass the lovebirds who make out in their cars.

With my brother, I put together my first book. It’s called "The Martyrdom of Florence ."My sister is tortured on every page.

We draw a lot. Both of our parents teach art and we’ve got as much paper and as many crayons as we want.

In the alleyway, everything changes very fast. An apartment building and a parking lot are erected on the ruins of the warehouse. Part of the old structure is left standing.

My brother is the first and only one of us to speak to him.

Every day, one worker eats his lunch by himself, perched on a little wall in the parking lot.

Can I have a piece of your bread?

I ain’t eating his bread. I don’t wanna die.

That’s RAGHEAD ! "Raggedy" is like all torn up.

Are you nuts, Jean-Christophe ? That bread is poisoned!

What’s your name ?

He’s a raggedy!

Mohamed.

Is that beer ?

You want a piece of bread, Pierre-François ?

Don’t eat it !

No, apple juice. I don’t drink alcohol. Would you like some?

Watch it, Jean-Christophe.

"Raghead" -- there’s a word I never heard at home. My dad hadn’t served in the Algerian War, but I’d heard about it.

My dad was there, he told me.

They kill people with their knives.

Algeria is a desert full of fortresses with legionnaires inside.

One day the Beduins got fed up and, mounted on horses and camels, they came and attacked the fortresses.

Little by little, they took over all the fortresses. The legionnaires fell back in Algiers.

The Beduins attacked Algiers and the legionnaires got on the boat and came back to France. The Algerian war was over...

At night we sneak into the now-vacated building that was left standing.

Check it out. A splash of blood !

He slit someone’s throat here !

It’s Mohamed!

You sure ?

Hey, Richard’s got a flashlight !

Of course ! The guy goes in, he thinks it’s a dead end, he turns around...

Look at that. There’s two doors, one behind the other !

...and Mohamed is hidden behind the second door and he stabs the guy in the back!