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From Publishers Weekly
David B. is one of the founders of the French experimental comics collective L'Association, and this hallucinatory work (the first of two volumes) is a sort of refracted story of his childhood when he was known as Pierre-Fran‡ois. On a literal level, it's a fascinating memoir of how his brother's epilepsy became the driving force of his family's life in the 1960s and '70s. Desperate to find a cure for his brother's condition, his parents turn to ascetic macrobiotic cults, deeply esoteric spiritualists and more in search of something that might help him. They encounter all manner of cruelty and quackery but occasionally find something that helps. B.'s own fascination with history and war seems to protect him from the despair that perpetually surrounds the family. His visual retelling of their suffering is a masterpiece of surrealistic cartooning and fantastic imagery. Readers see B. as a child; as his mind blurs the distinction between reality, metaphor and fiction, so does his art. He draws a macrobiotic healer as a cartoon tiger, and fills the book with iconic metaphors for disease (epilepsy is like a demon from a cave drawing). His has a fascination with Swedenborgian mysticism and Samurai warriors, who are vehicles for gorgeously stylized b&w illustrations of warfare and bloodletting. The narrative thread peels aside for digressions to depict young Pierre-Fran‡ois' dreams or to carefully denote the family's endless efforts to find relief for their son and ultimately for themselves. Almost every panel is a graphic balancing act between representation and psychological distortion. This is truly a remarkable and powerful piece of comics narration.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-This autobiographical work plumbs the psychological, social, and symbolic reaches of the author's experiences in a family that must deal with a devastating disease. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in France's Loire Valley, Jean-Christophe developed grand mal epilepsy around the age of 11. Pierre-Francois, nine, observes his brother's battle with the physical and social implications of the disease; their parents' efforts to find management of it through medical, macrobiotic, and even psychic interventions; and the author's own development in this milieu as a boy obsessed with history and warfare and as a dedicated artist. This is a full-strength novel with well-developed characters, subplots concerning both World Wars, and riffs on the popular culture of the period in which hip Westerners looked to the East for solutions to health and spiritual maladies. David B.'s black-and-white panels spin with Jungian figures of serpents and offer snapshots of commune kitchens, woodlots haunted by his recently deceased grandfather, and street alleys where neighborhood children fantasize the distant past and uncharted future. This volume comprises half of the eight titles originally published in French, and readers will eagerly await its companion. Teens who have read Don Trembath's Lefty Carmichael Has a Fit (Orca, 2000) or Lauren Slater's Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir (Random, 2000) may find this book to be the one that encourages them to become aficionados of sophisticated, graphic-novel literature.
Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
An Alchemical Text Into a Childhood, Disease, and a Life,
By
This review is from: Epileptic (Hardcover)
The first thing that needs to be stated is this is not Epileptic 1. Epileptic 1 gathered the first three English-translated volumes of David B.'s work back in around 2002. What you have both here and in, as far as I know, the soft-cover version is the entire six-volume collection gathered into one English-language graphic novel translated from its original French language. The other reviews here, including those copied by Amazon, were not up to date on this matter.Despite the English title of this graphic novel, Epileptic is not purely about epilepsy. It is about a family in France dealing with the epileptic fits of one of its members -- its eldest child Jean-Christophe -- and the effect that this has on the family. In many ways, epilepsy itself is made into an invisible hidden monster that forces the family of the author David B. -- formerly known as Pierre-Francois Beauchard -- to seek the often false and "fool's gold" powers of alternative medicine and philosophies such as macrobiotics as well as occultism and spiritualism to not only attempt to end Jean-Christophe's seizures but to also try to heal the pain that his illness and life itself is causing them as well. As a result of this, David B. creates a very interesting comics landscape in his work. He draws on the power of old dreams, early fantastic story attempts, mystical symbolism, childhood hopes and drawings and combines them into an almost stark yet lush black-and-white glyphic text that ties the pain of his brother to his own pain, dealings with life and creativity. There is so much information crammed into the captions and dialogue of this work that sometimes it can be just as overwhelming as the feelings of thwarted hope and despair over finding a cure for David B.'s older brother that the narrative conveys. David B. also utilizes meta-narrative devices in which at times he even includes discussions with his parents about the content of this book itself, and the inclusion of his own often silent creative daimons or guides in the form of an Ibis-headed version of his dead grandfather and three dark creative muses. What all of this does is allow David B. to focus on his brother's epilepsy and spread his focus across his own family's history of personal struggle against suffering, and how the collective trauma France's involvement in the two World Wars and the Algerian War affected them. There seems to be this implied undercurrent that ties all of these elements together and the enemy that David B. is fighting seems not to be the just demon of epilepsy or the absence of an older brother in his life, but rather helplessness itself. I think of this book as almost a mythological and alchemical text chronicling his fight against that force. This was an excellent graphic narrative, however the small cramped nature of the lettering did make it hard to concentrate on the content. Also, sometimes the French to English translation did seem a little awkward: especially with regards to the poetic translations. There were also many references to French fantasy, poetry and literature that I was unfamiliar with and couldn't relate to. But this is David B.'s own story: a story that is his brother's, his family's, his country's, and in some ways all of humanity's story. This work is an immense achievement.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Troubling and unforgettable,
By
This review is from: Epileptic (Paperback)
Epileptic relates the real-life story of the author, mostly how his childhood was impacted by the severe epilepsy of his older brother. Through his drawings, the author shares with us his perception as a child of the sickness of his brother. Both the writing and graphic styles are quite moving and often surrealistic. The author is very successful in communicating his feelings, to the point where the experience can sometime be uncomfortable to the reader. The only negative comment I would make is that I found that the story was dragging for the last third of the book (hence the 4 stars), but not to the point to become boring. I highly recommend this graphic novel.
5.0 out of 5 stars
WOW!,
By "amundso" (Stillwater, OK United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Epileptic, t. 01 (haut mal t. 01 à t. 03 en anglais) (Paperback)
This book is amazingly great! I want the next volume NOW! Order this if you want a really wonderful comic that is a great first exposure to the French expressionist comics movement. This is definitly a must own book. I really admire this guy, David B. Hopefully, my work will be able to match this man's, someday. Everything about this book is wonderful: paper, ink, art, story, etc., etc. An inspiration, scrible it down in your memo pad!
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