For a respite from reality, few things beat a good comic book. I fondly remember Superman, Spiderman, Asterix and Obelix (inexplicable, I know), X-Men and many other barely discernible spin-offs providing me with a vicarious escape from taking out the trash and writing book reports.
Comics have grown up alongside their readers, and their topics are no longer constrained to superhero exploits and fantasy worlds. Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor explored everyday life, Robert Crumb’s bizarre series of works delved into the author’s sexual fetishes and Art Spiegelman’s brilliant Maus books dealt with the human toll of Holocaust death camps. The two successful Persepolis books capture the story of Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian woman who fled her homeland. Now, a well-established French author is poised to become the next big name in the genre.
David B. is the alias of Pierre-Fran?ois Beauchard, and with Epileptic, he has created a masterwork of a graphic novel. Beauchard is well known in the world of comics for his role in founding the influential L’Association, the leading collective of French cartoonists. Epileptic is an anthology and the first translation of the six parts of a serial project he worked on from 1996 to 2004. The story is autobiographical, takes place mainly in the ‘60s and ‘70s and deals with his family and how they coped with his older brother Jean-Christophe’s severe epilepsy. As you might expect, this isn’t light fare.
Two main themes run through the book, the first of which is the question of family obligations. David feels the impulse to protect his brother from a world that doesn’t understand his disease while simultaneously wanting to abandon him so that he can lead his own life. In one especially poignant scene, David stays to care for Jean-Christophe during a severe seizure, while his mother, drained from years of caring for her increasingly hostile son, walks away from the crowd that gathers to gawk.
The secondary theme of escape goes hand in hand with the first. The young David avoids the reality of his brother’s illness through imagination and books. We see him wearing bulky armor, protecting himself both from a cold, hostile outside world and from a home situation that is defined by disease.
As the main character, Beauchard does himself few favors in the storytelling. The author leaves his flaws on display: nothing is off-limits, from his bullying of his younger sister and Jean-Christophe to his self-centeredness and self-destructive attitude. The dreams he recounts toward the end of the book are bizarre, and his fascination with war and conflict are disturbing, but in the end his character is more fully developed than if some of the darker elements of his personality had been pushed aside.
Still, Epileptic is not a constantly depressing work. The ‘60s and ‘70s were as much an era of counter culture, mystical healing and free love in France as in the United States, and some of the “cures” that David’s family tries are laughably nonsensical. David’s tales of macrobiotic communities are hilarious, as are the family’s attempts at magnetism, symbolism and even alchemy.
Graphically, Epileptic is stunning. The entire book is illustrated in black and white, often heavily dark but always remarkably detailed. Collected as a whole, the drawings from the six parts of Epileptic are remarkably coherent. Although there are some noticeable differences (the final section is the most detailed and David’s shading has clearly developed), the recurrent characters hold the book together.
David’s dead grandfather, Genghis Khan’s warriors and a handful of ghosts that the young David creates to keep himself company all play central roles in the book, in almost Gorey-esque representations. Beauchard’s imagery of epilepsy is seen here both in a mountain that symbolizes the struggle with the disease and in a collection of demons and dragons representing the disease itself, capturing his understanding of the disease as well as, if not better than, his words.
Epileptic doesn’t provide the reader with the sort of escape typically associated with comic books, even if escape is a central theme of the book. Beauchard is no longer seeking that escape he so desired in his youth; Epileptic is honest and forthright. It’s often depressing, but it’s also beautiful, enthralling and at times funny. There’s no uplifting ending, and David presents this truth unflinchingly. Epileptic may not be fun-in-the-sun spring break reading, but it gets to the heart of questions about how we cope with disease and the disabled in our families and societies, and how we choose to define ourselves in the face of hardship. Epileptic isn’t easy, but ultimately it’s something far better: it is deeply truthful and insightful, and there is little more we can ask of the literary world than that.
