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"Epileptic" is a raw and moving account of a child coming to terms with his brother's epilepsy, told through strikingly heartfelt words and deceptively simple, yet richly detailed, black and white drawings.
David B. has taken the graphic novel form to a new level by telling the story of his brother, Jean-Christophe, a precocious boy living in Orleans, France, who suffers his first epileptic seizure at age 7 and slowly begins to withdraw into himself and away from his family.
The author -- born Pierre Francois Beauchard -- finds himself a caretaker for his older brother, catching him as a seizure overcomes him and trying unsuccessfully to convince neighborhood children not to shun his brother for his sickness. He even realizes that he can provoke a seizure just by taunting his brother, which gives the 5- year-old conflicting feelings of power and remorse.
As Jean-Christophe's condition worsens, Pierre Francois begins to illustrate feelings he cannot fully understand, drawing sweeping battle scenes from the Algerian War and World War I. Later, inspired by the science fiction magazine "Planete," he begins to draw ghosts, robots and demons. He imagines his brother's epilepsy as a giant ever-present dragon, from which neither Jean-Christophe, nor his family, can ever escape. It's a monster that never leaves the house, and it haunts every member of the family.
As his family grows increasingly desperate for cures, flirting with neurosurgery, zen macrobiotics, spiritualism, alchemy and other combinations of science, pseudo-science and snake-oil, Pierre Francois grows into adolescence and adulthood, while his brother regresses into a state of defeat and back into a sort of infancy.
Through his drawings, the outwardly stoic Pierre Francois reveals the inner pain and horror he feels for his brother, himself, and his family.
The book is a family memoir in comic book form, dealing with complex and at times uncomfortable issues, such as the author's love for his brother tinged with hatred and resentment for his inability to deal with his illness. He quietly hopes for his brother's death so the monster will be vanquished, then suffers through immense guilt for having wished harm to his brother.
It's a fascinating read, due mostly to David B.'s honest approach and admissions, as well as his surrealist drawings, where his family is haunted by ominous ghosts -- both real and imagined -- and people shape-shift into different forms as they do in dreams.
Originally published in France in six volumes as "L'Ascension du Haut Mal" by L'Association -- a group of French cartoonists, including David B., who have been critically hailed for helping to revolutionize European comic books in terms of style, format, and content -- the entire series is brought together and translated into one volume by Pantheon Books. The Pantheon edition does not delineate where each of the original six volumes begins and ends, so there are no natural breaks to allow the reader to stop and digest some of the thick imagery and symbolism and pause before going forward to the next chapter, but that's a rather minor omission.
For the past 20 years, the graphic novel form has battled for mainstream acceptance in the United States. While accepted as adult fare in most of Europe and throughout Japan, it's still a niche medium to American audiences. "Epileptic" is groundbreaking to the form because the story simply could not have been told with words alone. David B.'s drawings evoke a primal and profound response. They tell a story of emotions -- of fear, misunderstanding, quiet desperation, and ultimately of brotherly love -- in a deeper, more personal way than prose alone.
The most beautiful scene is the epilogue, where David B. imagines himself and his brother flying through the air on white horses. They talk about the epilepsy and their feelings for one another simply and without pretense.
"I've often been criticized for the darkness and violence of my stories," David B. says. "I didn't realize I was writing about you."
Dan Murphy is a free-lance reviewer.
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>Epileptic
By David B.
Pantheon, 364 pages, $17.95
(C) 2006 Buffalo News. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
