His dead grandfather has the head of a long-beaked bird his brother’s epilepsy is a sort of alligator-mouthed serpent with an endless body. The artwork in Epileptic tracks his perceptions, becoming increasingly elaborate and design-heavy.
At the same time, he starts to see a sort of second, metaphorical layer to his physical surroundings. His fantasy life becomes an armor he takes to be literal, protecting him from the bloody chaos of his brother’s illness, but also threatening to seal him off from the world altogether. He becomes obsessed with the idea of another reality, and with drawing battles and fantasy monsters. Jean-Christophe commands the family’s attention as he deteriorates physically and mentally meanwhile, Pierre-François slowly descends into a madness of his own, less malign than his brother’s, but just as powerful. We see their parents drag the family around Europe for most of a decade in search of anything that might help Jean-Christophe-mostly mystical “miracle cures” from one alternative-medicine quack after another: Swedenborgian spiritualists, macrobiotic masseurs, Rosicrucian Templars. was a 5-year-old boy named Pierre-François Beauchard, fascinated by the history of warfare and just starting to draw, and his older brother Jean-Christophe began to have epileptic seizures. It is entirely, obsessively, mesmerizingly the work of a single visual artist, and its narrative is the devastating story of how his vision rose from sickness and despair.Įpileptic is a memoir that’s violently refracted through imaginary images. It’s neither cinematic nor literary: At every turn, it does things that only comics can do. The French cartoonist David B.’s extraordinary L’Ascension du Haut-Mal, just published in its entirety in English for the first time as Epileptic, supersedes the standard line, exactly as the best art is supposed to. The standard line on first-rate graphic novels is that they’re “cinematic,” or sometimes “literary.” That’s why a lot of third-rate graphic novels give the sense that they’re essentially storyboards for a movie pitch, or a prose story with pictures tacked on.
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