EPILEPTIC
David B.
(Jonathan Cape; £16.99)
Must the graphic-novel wars be fought over and over again? After all this time, after Art Spieglman’s Maus, Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, Joe Sacco’s Palestine and the notional mainstream acceptance of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and the Hernandez Brothers, is it still necessary to ask whether the graphic novel deserves to be recognised as a legitimate territory within the wider world of art and literature, or whether it is simply the cultural equivalent of a rogue state, tolerated only on a case-by-case basis and subject to constant guarantees of good behaviour?
The Case Against makes little logical sense, but it is relatively easy to summarise. Words are good: they’re in libraries. Pictures are good: they’re in galleries and museums. Words and pictures together are rubbish, fit only for the juvenile or semi-literate. David B’s sprawling autobiographical narrative Epileptic is the latest instalment of the Case For. ‘David B’ is the pseudonym of Pierre-François Beauchard, The Comics Journal’s European Artist of the Year for 1998 and winner of France’s prestigious Aph’ Art award for comics excellence in 2000. Epileptic was originally published in six volumes between 1996 and 2004 under the title L’Ascension Du Haut-Mal. This present complete edition has been translated from the French by Kim Thompson, and a crisp, vigorous, idiomatic translation it is, too.
The story of Epileptic is relatively straightforward; its treatment not so. When Beauchard is a nine-year-old child growing up in Orleans, his brother Jean-Christophe, four years his senior, begins to suffer epileptic seizures of devastating frequency and intensity. Soon Jean-Christophe’s ailment becomes the dominant fact of the family’s life. Neither conventional nor alternative medicine can provide any long-term solutions. The family then turns to mysticism, which yields no better result, though David B derives much satirical substance from the family’s misadventures in macrobiotic communes and with psychics and anti-psychiatrists.
Young Pierre-François retreats into historical fantasies of battles and warlords, drawing ever more detailed pictures and stories of medieval conquests and combat. Jean-Christophe develops an obsession with dictatorship: despite a brief dalliance with Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky, he is mainly fixated on Hitler. He wants to draw a massive illustration of a swastika flag for his bedroom, but his ailment and his medication render this impossible. He asks his mother and his brother to draw it for him, but they both refuse. “I wonder which is worse,” Pierre-François muses. “The desire to draw a Nazi flag or the inability to do so.”
Jean-Christophe eventually embraces his illness: it provides him with the excuse never to have to grapple with the complexities of the adult life which seems to be crushing him with its implacable advance. The parents grow more and more distraught as all avenues for helping their increasingly dysfunctional son are remorselessly closed off. Pierre-François becomes progressively more withdrawn, burying himself in his ever-more-convoluted artwork and storytelling, and in protracted conversation with a burgeoning posse of imaginary companions.
Attending art school in Paris, Pierre-François’s first-year teacher tells him, “You’re twisted, Beauchard. You always manage to make the viewer uncomfortable with your artwork.” This pleases the artist immensely. “Disturbing? That’s exactly what I’m trying to put across. That’s the theme of my work. Behind my bizarre inventions, that’s my real subject. Anxiety …”
Epileptic is by no means an ‘easy read’ in any possible sense of the term. No-one is going to use this book as an excuse to avoid dealing with ‘proper’ literature. It is long: over 300 pages, and its subject matter is as deep, dark and dense as Beuchard’s artwork, which is blocky, high-contrast and reminiscent of antique woodcut illustrations to the grimmest of Grimm fairy- and folk-tales.
The ultimate justification for Epileptic’s existence as a graphic novel is this: it is nigh-on impossible to imagine it being anywhere near as effective in any other genre: as prose fiction, or even as a movie. Whether traditionalists like it or not, the graphic novel is now the first-choice mode of expression for many profound sensibilities, seeking to tell tales as rich and complex as can be found in any narrative form.
Independent, 2005
