EPILEPTIC
By David B.
Pantheon. 361 pp. $25
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. •
Chris Lehmann is features editor of New York magazine.
