ESSENTIAL // 11.14.02

EPILEPTIC VOLUME 1
By Rob Clough

EPILEPTIC Volume 1
David B.
Fantagraphics Books
$24.95, 160 pages
STAR 16093
ISBN 2844140858

Autobiography as a sub-genre has taken something of a beating the last few years in the comics world. Detractors of alt-comics will point to autobio as boring, self-indulgent navel-gazing. Who wants to hear about some twenty-something whine about not having a job, not getting laid or the fact that no one cares about their comics? Of course, there are a quite a few skilled artists whose milieu is autobio in the sense that most Americans understand it--a sort of day-to-day diary of ordinary experiences. Harvey Pekar still does it better than anyone else, while young Ariel Schrag produces some of the most harrowing work published today with her high school stories. Still, that sort of stereotypical whiny autobio so pervaded comics that the anthology ZERO ZERO forbade its use. Along the same lines, one reason the SPX anthology went to biography for its most recent edition was that the editor was tired of getting autobiographical submissions about people hanging out in coffee shops.

Put all that aside when considering French artist David B's EPILEPTIC. First, put aside the somewhat clunky title--the original French title, "L'Ascension du Haut-Mal" doesn't easily translate into English vernacular. While a lot of autobio is simple ego gratification or documentation, David is trying to get at something else: the inner struggles we all face and frequently can never totally overcome. He manages this through a simple and detached narrative style where the boldly stark art is often in an interesting state of tension with the written narrative. The images he uses range from the realistic to the
fantastic to the nightmarish, yet never spiral out of control.

EPILEPTIC 1 collects the first three parts of a six-part story; the sixth part may have just been published in French. The author, who uses the name Pierre-Francois in the story, tells us of growing up in France in the 60's and 70's with his parents and two siblings. His older brother, Jean-Christophe, suffers from epilepsy. That particular revelation turns
out to alter the lives of everyone in the family in radically different ways. He starts out the story when he's 5, his brother is 7 and their younger sister Florence is 4. The brothers act like kids--sometimes sweet in their naiveté', sometimes shocking in their viciousness.
Pierre-Francois in particular loves stories about war, violence and killing, and his brother works with him on drawing stories about this. His parents do shield them from racism, a concept he doesn't understand but is confronted with. Some boys from his neighborhood gang view a Muslim construction worker as an assassin thanks to France's recently
concluded war with Algeria. When Jean-Christophe starts to have public seizures, he becomes the new bogeyman for the gang, a fact not lost on Pierre-Francois.

Epilepsy becomes a tangible, powerful force in the family. It takes Jean-Christophe away, and he often hurts himself when he falls to the ground during a seizure. The first page of the story has the modern version of him in an encounter with Pierre-Francois, and Jean-Christophe is scarred, bloated and slow. The main emotion felt by the brothers is
rage. For Pierre-Francois, he vents his rage through his art, drawing elaborate battle scenes with all sorts of carnage. Jean-Christophe has fantasies of power and domination to make up for his lack of control, identifying first with Hitler and then later with Stalin. He mostly had the fantasy of being loved and admired by endless armies.

The book takes several interesting twists and turns. David B will go on extended tangents in discussing family history, especially in talking about his grandparents and their struggles. One grandfather fought in World War I and we quickly learn that David B has no illusions about what war really means as an adult. But where things take a really interesting turn is what course of action the parents decide on for Jean-Christophe's
treatment. After seeing a battery of doctors, a brusque & egotistical surgeon decided on a particular operation whose side effects could be incredibly severe. Shortly before this is to happen, they learn of a new movement: zen macrobiotics. Remember, this is the late 60's and early 70's, the dawn of the anti-psychiatry movement. Jean-Christophe goes to
see a guru who implements this dietary change (mostly rice & vegetables), as well as acupuncture and massage. It works, as Jean-Christophe finds "someone to whom he can pass along his misery and who knows what to do with it."

After the guru is forced to leave France, the family spends their summers on macrobiotic communes where what food to eat becomes a power struggle. The seizures start to return and the family moves away from their home to a more remote location, in part because other families were uncomfortable with him out in public. The new locale does him some good, until the next major traumatic event occurs: the death of their other
grandfather, their mother's father. The family becomes more and more desperate, living on increasingly draconian macrobiotic communes and then turning to spiritualism in an attempt to help Jean-Christophe. By the end of the third chapter, he has given up on trying to find a cure and is sick of everyone--especially his own parents--as he goes off to live in a home for the handicapped. Pierre-Francois has closed himself off to the world
while Florence has begun a descent into depression, while their parents simply don't know what to do.

The story on its own is an intriguing one and goes into some detail about some of the more utopian movements of the 70's. But what makes this work so amazing is the way he combines word and image so fluidly and flawlessly. Take chapter 1, page 10, panel 1. The caption reads, "And thus begins the endless round of doctors, for my brother and my parents." The panel has a large group of doctors, hand in hand, dancing around Jean-Christopher and his parents. The images David B uses are stark, with a heavy emphasis on blacks. There is no crosshatching and very little shading, which feeds into the frequently dreamlike nature of the narrative. A great example comes on chapter 1, page 45, panel 1. Jean-Christophe's parents have just told the doctors that they're refusing
surgery, and accuse them of being criminals for not going through "Professor T's" operation (as opposed to Jean-Christophe's operation). The figures in the panel are entirely black, like shadows, with just their eyes, noses and teeth showing up as white. The look is a monstrous one. A more whimsical example is Jean-Christophe's guru, who reminds Pierre-Francois of a large cat. He is drawn as an anthropormorphic cat
throughout the story. Another funny juxtaposition comes in chapter 1, pages 49-50. He's discussing the family's new diet and how much he likes it, since prior to that he had been a picky eater. "My dinner plate is teeming with enemies", and the panels show Pierre-Francois being threatened by a monster coming out of a pot, attacking a sausage-like
monster with a sword, and hiding under the table from the creatures emerging from plates. Pierre-Francois seeing everything in terms of conflict and rage is his defining characteristic; how he deals with it is as central to the story as Jean-Christophe's disease.

One of the big problems with autobiography is that the author makes their own representation too sympathetic, either by making them too likable or overburdened by problems. Either way, you identify with them and root for them. David B takes a different tact. His own "character" does all sorts of nasty things but regards himself as a normal boy. He is blunt in relating how difficult he was as a child while still maintaining
the absolute certainly of self a child often possesses. At the same time, there is an understanding of his own pathology. His response to the ghosts haunting the family was to embrace them--he often went out late at night to hang out with spirits, especially that of his grandfather. (He is represented as a bird, because that's why his rigid jaw looked like when Pierre-Francois saw him shortly after he died.) His response to Jean-Christophe's epilepsy was to see it as a dragon-like monster that lived inside of him. To protect himself, he imagined that he wore armor, had drawings of armored men protecting his room at night and closed himself off emotionally more and more as the story goes on.

The art becomes more and more fantastic & grotesque as the course of the disease becomes worse. The dragon of epilepsy "slumbers inside my brother, and upon awakening, it slithers out and insinuates itself into our lives". You can imagine what that panel looks like. As a result, Pierre-Francois becomes more and more fascinated with figures like Genghis Khan and his fantasies about them. "I need them. I feel like I'm under siege, here in our faraway home." The more he learns about the world of adults, the more disillusioned he becomes--especially in the hypocrisy of power struggles in utopian communes, where "the society we left behind had recreated itself." By the end of the first part, Pierre-Francois has rejected all authority figures and has become a caustic skeptic.

At certain points, David B pulls back and we are reminded that he is telling a story of his childhood from his vantage point of an adult. Showing the story to his mother, she objects to the way he has portrayed her grandmother. David had reduced her to being an alcoholic, but his mother goes on to describe her more charming qualities. This is during a section where he talks a lot about the struggles of her grandfather and her parents and he makes his agenda transparent: their uphill battle against misery was much like his own family's struggle. The struggle itself is what's important, and the only sin is to surrender. When Jean-Christophe stops fighting at the end of chapter 3, Pierre-Francois coldly observes "Now he's going to use his illness to avoid dealing with life." The image of Jean-Christophe playing cards with his epileptic dragon and ignoring his family is a haunting one.

The only thing wrong with reading EPILEPTIC 1 is that we have to wait until 2003 for part 2. Part 1 finishes up in the early teenage years for the characters, with hints of greater problems to come for some of them. In discussing the best books of 2002, EPILEPTIC leads the rest of the field by Secretariat-like lengths. It's a work of depth and complexity that is not obscure or difficult to read. It's a work that approaches Serious Issues with a sense of dark-edged whimsy. Many people will see a lot of their own childhoods in this account even if none of the details resonate in a cheap or easy manner. It's one man's account of the more tragic details of his own life, and perhaps an attempt at therapy.

EPILEPTIC VOLUME 1 is published by Fantagraphics Books, and has a cover price of $24.95. This book is in print, so if your local comic store can't get a copy for you with the STAR code of STAR16093 or the ISBN code of 2844140858, we suggest finding a better store.