Epileptic by David B.

From the Publisher

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 hiscomplicated 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 New York Times - Rick Moody

Because it is unafraid to dwell in detail on cultural and intellectual lineage, Epileptic seems to be influenced as much by Gide, Foucault, Malraux and Barthes as by Spiegelman. It is less a graphic novel, that is, than a bildungsroman about the artist as reader of continental philosophy, wherein Jean-Christophe's epilepsy, and its attendant familial disorder, are the fulcrum that forces Pierre-Francois to become the author David B., spawning his magnificent pictures, drawings full of the iconographies of both atavism and surrealism.

The Washington Post - Chris Lehmann

… 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.

The New Yorker

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.

Publishers Weekly

The first half of French cartoonist David B.'s astonishing L'Ascension du Haut Mal appeared in English a few years ago, but this is the first time the whole book has been translated, and it's one of the greatest graphic novels ever published. Epileptic is a memoir of B.'s evolution into an artist, how learning to re-envision and recreate the world with his eyes and hands became his escape route from the madness and disease that might have destroyed him. B.'s family becomes involved with the shady alternative medicine world in France circa 1970 in an attempt to help his epileptic, unstable older brother. What B. picks up from that culture, from the military history he obsesses over and from his brother's cruel delusions is the raw material of his art: his stylized bodies and objects, which look like woodcuts and urn drawings, and especially his constant conflation of physical reality and symbolic value. With B.'s parents consumed with finding a cure, and his brother's quality of life deteriorating, B.'s dreams of a normal childhood are constantly undermined by his brother's illness, to be replaced by a waking and dreaming life filled with demons.This struggle becomes Epileptic's narrative core. B.'s artwork is magnificent-gorgeously bold, impressionistic representations of the world not as it is but as he's taught himself to perceive it-especially in the heartbreaking dream sequences near the end of the book. B.'s illustrations constantly underscore his writing's wrenching psychological depth; readers can literally see how the chaos of his childhood shaped his vision and mind. (Jan. 4) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The latest entry in the graphic novel sweepstakes, from the publisher who brought us Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. Here, Frenchman David B., a founding member of the cutting-edge cartooning group L'Association, chronicles his brother's epilepsy. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Fantastical, gloriously illustrated graphic memoir of the French cartoonist's life, overshadowed by an epileptic brother. Born Pierre-Francois Beauchard, David B., a founding member of the avant-garde cartoonist group L'Association, grew up in a small town near Orleans during the 1960s, the son of two open-minded educators. His older brother, Jean-Christophe, began having severe seizures at an early age, and the disease gradually consumed the family. B.'s parents eventually lost faith in traditional doctors, who treated their ailing son more like a test case than a human being, and moved on to alternative cures. Many of them worked at first but became progressively less effective; treatment for Jean-Christophe turned into a revolving door of one guru after another. The family shuttled up to Paris to see acupuncturists and spent time in a macrobiotic commune that quickly became ugly and fascistic. Meanwhile, David increasingly retreated into a rich interior private universe to escape the reality an incurable sickness. He spun his intricate fantasies of war, monsters and shadowy conspiracies into elaborate drawings, which flow through the pages of this magnificent volume. Fantastic beasts and dark winds lurk around the peripheries of the real events being depicted and often come leaping right through them. Lost in his tales of golems, birdmen and dancing skeletons, David shielded himself from his brother's desperate condition: "My armor is the night." This masterful work of graphic art also succeeds as a tender yet unabashedly realistic view of the disease that eventually claimed Jean-Christophe. The boy was undoubtedly a victim, but he didn't do the little that he could to help himself andcouldn't help but drag the rest of the family down with him. This context makes the rage that David and the rest of the family felt toward Jean-Christophe entirely understandable, though no less disturbing. An unromantic, heartrending tale, wrapped in a cloak of nightmares.

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