Epileptic (graphic novel)

AUTHOR: B., David (pseudonym of Pierre-François Beauchard)

ARTIST: David B. (illustrator); Eve Deluze (letterer); Fanny Dalle-Rive (letterer); Jean-Christophe Menu (cover artist)

PUBLISHERS: L’Association (French); Pantheon Books (English)

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION:L’Ascension du Haut Mal, 1996-2003 (English translation, 2005)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2005 (English)

Publication History

David B.’s (Pierre-François Beauchard’s) Epileptic was first published in France as the award-winning L’Ascension du Haut Mal (The Rise of the High Evil) by L’Association, of which Beauchard was a founding member. Beauchard began drawing Epileptic from the first day his brother was struck by epilepsy, and Epileptic provides some early examples (real or re-created) of Beauchard’s childhood artwork. In 2000, he won the French Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Best Script for L’Ascension du Haut Mal’s fourth volume. In 2002, an English translation gathered the first three volumes into Epileptic 1, followed by the complete Epileptic in 2005, which won the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Artist. For the English volume, Beauchard’s black-and-white drawings are accompanied by Kim Thompson’s translations.

Epileptic is David B.’s way of visually verbalizing the profound affect epilepsy had on his family. It took him twenty years to discover how to translate his dreams and feelings into pictures that display the intricacies of the war going on inside his brother, himself, and his family. The family history is portrayed as a battle of struggles over poverty, wars, and, finally, epilepsy. Beauchard’s fascination with the occult is clearly present in the work because, as he says, “it alludes to another dimension, another possibility . . . a hidden dimension. And that’s exactly what was going on with my brother’s illness.”

Plot

Epileptic opens on the idyllic childhood of Beauchard; his older brother, Jean-Christophe; and younger sister, Florence, in 1970’s France. Beauchard relishes stories of epic battles, and his art-teacher parents encourage his love of drawing, in spite of his subject matter.

Beauchard’s childhood innocence is cut short by his brother’s first epileptic seizure, which begins the family’s medical odyssey to find a cure. Beauchard lets Genghis Khan lead the charge in his rage-filled battle drawings, as his brother’s medication fails to stop his terrifying seizures. Beauchard’s mother and father turn to the Psycho Pedagogical Institute and then contemplate surgery, but Jean-Christophe seeks out a disciple of Zen macrobiotics, and his seizures stop miraculously. The whole family moves into a macrobiotic commune until the petty ego trips of the adults begin—and summer vacation comes to an end. The family then moves to a country estate while maintaining their commitment to the macrobiotic diet and acupuncture, but Jean-Christophe’s seizures eventually return.

Beauchard soon realizes that his brother’s epilepsy has wormed its way into everyone’s lives. Jean-Christophe begins a regimen of medication, but the family soon seeks out another macrobiotic commune filled with backbreaking work and guilt. Eventually, Jean-Christophe relapses into seizures and the family experiences ignorance and intolerance, causing Beauchard to sharpen his pencil against such attacks. As a teenager, Jean-Christophe finally rebels against treatment and begins school at a center for the handicapped, where he gives up on the idea of being cured.

The family never gives up, however. Alternative therapies are tested through psychics peddling past-life regression and Ouija boards. Meanwhile, Beauchard draws his own guardian angels, demons, and monsters while his birdlike grandfather haunts him. His mother takes up Swedenborgian philosophy and talking to the dead. At the end of 1970, having fully sealed himself into the intricate armor of his drawings, Beauchard changes his name from Pierre-François to David. When Jean-Christophe returns from boarding school, he has completely escaped into his own disease.

As a teenager, Beauchard gives up children’s books for fantastic realism and esoteric works, as they seem to best represent his life. Jean-Christophe, on the other hand, escapes into his childhood fantasies about Nazis, while his disease consumes the entire family. The family soon begins a new regimen of healers: a magnetizer, followed by a homeopath/psychiatrist, mediums, gurus, Rosicrucians, alchemy, voodoo, anthroposophy, astrology, and transactional analysis. Nothing works, but guilt keeps them seeking new cures.

Eventually, Jean-Christophe becomes violent and is sent to a handicapped school in Paris. Beauchard also goes to Paris as a student at the Applied Arts School, drawing his way past his brother’s disease and furiously walking the streets. He flunks out of school, is drafted into the army, and is eventually discharged into the streets of Paris. He and a few friends start L’Association comics publishing collective. The final pages of Epileptic record Beauchard’s dreams before returning to the present day, in which readers see Jean-Christophe bloated, scarred, and delusional. In the concluding panels, Beauchard dreams of following his brother into his epilepsy while riding a white horse to fight his way through the armies of disease.

Volumes

•Epileptic 1 (2002). Collects Volumes 1 through 3 and depicts the first half of the family’s struggle against their son’s epilepsy.

•Epileptic (2005). Collects all issues, reflecting the Beauchard family’s battle against epilepsy.

Characters

•Pierre-François Beauchard (David B.), the protagonist, has black hair and often wears glasses. His brother’s epilepsy haunts him and forms his imagination as he escapes the demon disease in a world of fantasy, storytelling, and illustration. He feels guilty about being healthy and resenting his brother’s strain on the family resources. As an adolescent, he changes his name to David B. to wall himself off from epilepsy and its manifestations.

•Jean-Christophe Beauchard is the oldest of the Beauchard children. He has black hair, a long nose, and protruding lips and wears glasses. At the age of eleven, he is struck with epilepsy, and as he grows older, he retreats into the twisted world of his disease, often becoming violent, paranoid, and delusional.

•Florence Beauchard is the author’s sister. She has long black hair and is the youngest of the family. She is caught in the web of the family disease, ignored by her parents, and abused by her brothers. At one point, she tries to take her life, but, eventually, she comes to terms with her family, her brother’s disease, and her place in the universe. She provides Epileptic’s foreword and conclusion.

•Marie-Claire Beauchard (Mom), is a slim, blond-haired art teacher and mother of three. Her quest to heal her son’s epilepsy leads the family through communes, quack cures, and alternative schools. Her great-grandmother introduced her to the occult, white magic, and fairies, one of the worlds she consults in search of a cure.

•Father Beauchard (Dad), has black hair that, over the course of his family’s ordeal, goes from long to short to thinning. He is severe looking with bushy eyebrows. An art teacher and army veteran, he has his own ideas about treating epilepsy, including Rosicrucianism and Catholicism.

•Grandfather Gabriel is Beauchard’s maternal grandfather and a military veteran. He likes poetry, opera, viticulture, and women. When he dies, he haunts Beauchard’s imagination in the form of a long-beaked bird.

•Grandmother Fernande, Beauchard’s maternal grandmother, wears her dark hair parted on the side, and her glasses denote her schoolteacher’s intellectualism and love for poetry. She comes from a poor family, but that did not matter to Grandfather Gabriel, who loved her at first sight.

•Grandfather André, Beauchard’s paternal grandfather, is a military veteran. He is a large man who likes to eat and has far-right political leanings. When the young Beauchard learns he was not named David because his grandfather thought it sounded too Jewish, he promptly changes his name to David.

Artistic Style

An oval of yellow surrounding the red title is the only color to be found in this black-and-white graphic memoir. The invasion of epilepsy into the family’s life is portrayed in intricately drawn panels, featuring mythological iconography from medieval Europe to Gothic illuminated texts and Mesoamerican calendar stones to Buddhist, Christian, Babylonian, and Norse traditions. It is often hard to separate artful depictions from reality, as the slithering snake of illness, sometimes resembling the dragon figurehead of a Viking ship, moves in and around Jean-Christophe and the rest of the Beauchards. Even in the smallest panel, intense battles are fought among numerous combatants, with devils, monsters, ghosts, and knights fighting alongside Babylonians, Spartans, Assyrians, hoplites, and Mongols, all vying for victory over the demon Epilepsy. Portrayals are sharply drawn in this cartoonish world of high contrast black and white, with backgrounds ranging from common scenery to flat black or stark white and dense mazes of symbolic iconography.

The reader is encouraged to loiter over these scenes to wonder at the sheer overwhelming determination of Beauchard’s parents as they navigate their way toward a cure, one that they never find. Often portrayed as mad scientists, doctors hook elaborate machinery to Jean-Christophe’s brain to no avail. Many panels contain drawings accompanied by only text boxes. Speech bubbles often repeat what has been posited in a text box, and while this may be for emphasis, it can be distracting.

Themes

Epileptic can be considered a coming-of-age memoir of disease, as the author grows up while his family seeks a cure for his brother’s epilepsy. Beauchard’s dark pages are more than just a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare of despair; his black rage flows onto the pages as he fights back using his weapon of choice: the pen. As an adult, he realizes he coped with the family’s malady by escaping into esoteric works, his backyard, and drawing; his escape created the artist.

David B. draws epilepsy as a snake slithering through his brother, a Norse dragon that twists around his body like the snake found curling up the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden. The grandfather’s ghost takes on the guise of a thirteenth-century physician, wearing the long beaklike mask meant to hold the herbs and medicines that will ward off the plague, but modern medicine will not save Beauchard’s grandfather or his brother. Full-panel esoteric symbolism is intricately drawn, giving the reader a child’s impression of intellectual overload, while catlike Asians practice exotic therapies from the East.

David B. juxtaposes epilepsy with his family’s historical struggles to escape poverty, but with each commune the family inhabits comes a new round of toil and intolerance. He creates articulated knights to protect him as he escapes into his moonlit backyard to wander among the friendly ghosts awaiting him. Skeletons, ghosts, and images of the long dead fight through the battle scenes as representations of his brother’s illness, in which two warring factions jerk his brother this way and that and eventually entangle the whole family in an epileptic imbroglio.

Impact

David B. wrote his childhood in a surreal way that, as he says, “ruptures reality” by moving between flashbacks, family stories, and dreams while exploring fantasy and symbolic elements, thereby creating breaks in the linear narrative. The tone is different from other comic books because, as he puts it, he is “trying to shatter” the traditional comic format. Most of his works have a rebellious theme, and in Epileptic, nature rebels against the body.

Beauchard’s comics publishing history began soon after art school. He is a founding member of L’Association comics publishing collective and has collaborated on and drawn many graphic works, including Babel (2004, 2006), an autobiographical dream journal in which the artist escapes from know-nothing parents and do-nothing doctors, to La Lecture de ruines (Reading Ruins, 2001), featuring a mad scientist who is driven crazy by war. Les Complots nocturnes: Dix-neuf rêves, de décembre 1979 à septembre 1994 (Nocturnal Conspiracies: Nineteen Dreams from December 1979 to September 1994, 2005) reflects nightmare conspiracies, while Les Ogres (2000), which was published as part of Hiram Lowatt et Placido, is another battle-laden work and gives in to the cravings of cannibals.

David B.’s artistic influences range from the caricatural works of George Grosz to the collages of Max Ernst. Comic artists such as Jacques Tardi and Hugo Pratt inspired his striking black-and-white style. Another artistic force in his life is L’Planête, a heavily illustrated esoteric magazine he discovered as a child, which “depicted feelings, sensations, symbols, and it delighted me.” The family’s many cultural outings to Paris museums seem to have been absorbed on a molecular level, as Beauchard’s work reflects early woodcuts, engravings, illuminated Gothic manuscripts, pre-Columbian art, socialist art, medieval paintings, and Assyrian temple facades. What is fascinating is that this mishmash of stylistic renderings makes complete sense under Beauchard’s tutelage. Epileptic is a graphic memoir that David B. says helped “forge the weapons that allow me to become more than a sick man’s brother.”

Further Reading

B., David. Babel (2004, 2008).

Miller, Frank, and Lynn Varley. 300 (1998).

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis (2003).

Small, David. Stitches: A Memoir (2009).

Bibliography

Moody, Rick. “Epileptic: Disorder in the House.” The Best American Comics Criticism. Edited by Ben Schwartz. Seattle, Wash.: Fantagraphics Books, 2010.

Squier, Susan M. “So Long as They Grow Out of It: Comics, The Discourse of Developmental Normalcy and Disability.” Journal of Medical Humanities 29, no. 2 (June, 2008): 71-88.

Wivel, Matthias. “David B. Interview.” The Comics Journal 275 (March, 2006). http://archives.tcj.com/275/i‗davidb.html.

Wolk, Douglas. “This Sweet Sickness: David B.’s Epileptic Lays Bare the Author’s Tortured Muse—and Transfigures the Graphic Novel.” The New York Magazine, May 2005. http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/books/reviews/10851.