Publishers Weekly
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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-Franois. 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-Franois' 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. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
The identically titled first half of David B.'s graphic-novel account of his brother's lifelong battle with epilepsy and the family's desperate search for a cure appeared in 2002. This volume, previously published in Europe, collects the entire saga, and its cumulative impact confirms this as a landmark work in the autobiographical-comics genre. As young Jean-Christophe struggles with the illness, his parents desperately search for a cure, turning from psychiatry and neurosurgery to macrobiotics, spiritualism, and even voodoo. As Jean-Christophe grows increasingly troubled and violent, and the strain upon the family increases, young David escapes into a vividly depicted fantasy life, eventually fleeing to art school in Paris, where he honed the deceptively simple and highly expressive drawing style that serves his story so well. This volume follows the siblings into adulthood, concluding with a moving epilogue that touchingly demonstrates David's hard-won understanding of his brother's condition. Marjane Satrapi's acclaimed Persep0 olis BKL My 1 03; part 2, BKL Ag 04 owes a great deal to David B.'s simple, flattened drawing style; if his story is less compelling than hers, lacking Persepolis0 ' backdrop of twentieth-century Iranian history, his treatment is more artistic and sophisticated. Yet they are equally accessible to readers beyond as well as within the ranks of comics fans. --Gordon Flagg Copyright 2005 Booklist
School Library Journal
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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-Franois, 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 (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
School Library Journal
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Gr 10 Up–The cartoonist's memoir of growing up in a family in which his brother's grand mal epilepsy regularly took center stage is packaged here in its entirety. Although the first part of this book appeared in English in 2002, published by L'Association, there is no demarcation within the current volume to show where that break in the story occurred–nor does there need to be. David B. reports on the childhood adventures and interests he and his siblings shared–including warrior fantasies, a fascination with World War II, and drawing–and the family's increasing involvement in seeking help for coping with the epilepsy. The latter half of the complete work continues through adolescence and into manhood, including David B.'s education in art college and his founding of L'Association. His brother's failure to respond for any duration to any form of treatment or to adjust to life with a chronic disease is presented with unsentimental but humane forthrightness. The heavily inked images include many hallucinatory panels, and subplots involve the grandparents' prejudices, David's developing relationships outside the family, and his continued interest in his family. While the final difficulties revolve around the author and his inability to become a father, most of the book is both accessible and of high interest to teens.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Fantastical, gloriously illustrated graphic memoir of the French cartoonist's life, overshadowed by an epileptic brother. Born Pierre-FranÇois Beauchard, David B., a founding member of the avant-garde cartoonist group L'Association, grew up in a small town near Orleans during the 1960s, the son of two open-minded educators. His older brother, Jean-Christophe, began having severe seizures at an early age, and the disease gradually consumed the family. B.'s parents eventually lost faith in traditional doctors, who treated their ailing son more like a test case than a human being, and moved on to alternative cures. Many of them worked at first but became progressively less effective; treatment for Jean-Christophe turned into a revolving door of one guru after another. The family shuttled up to Paris to see acupuncturists and spent time in a macrobiotic commune that quickly became ugly and fascistic. Meanwhile, David increasingly retreated into a rich interior private universe to escape the reality an incurable sickness. He spun his intricate fantasies of war, monsters and shadowy conspiracies into elaborate drawings, which flow through the pages of this magnificent volume. Fantastic beasts and dark winds lurk around the peripheries of the real events being depicted and often come leaping right through them. Lost in his tales of golems, birdmen and dancing skeletons, David shielded himself from his brother's desperate condition: "My armor is the night." This masterful work of graphic art also succeeds as a tender yet unabashedly realistic view of the disease that eventually claimed Jean-Christophe. The boy was undoubtedly a victim, but he didn't do the little that he could to help himself and couldn't help but drag the rest of the family down with him. This context makes the rage that David and the rest of the family felt toward Jean-Christophe entirely understandable, though no less disturbing. An unromantic, heartrending tale, wrapped in a cloak of nightmares. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
Already published in Europe to great acclaim, this powerful graphic novel launches a series that promises to set an ambitious new standard for autobiographical comics. While centered on the author's brother Jean-Christophe's lifelong battle with epilepsy, the book tells the larger story of a troubled family undertaking a desperate odyssey to find a cure. Their peripatetic existence takes them throughout France as they desperately consult psychiatrists, join a Zen macrobiotic commune, resort to spiritualism, and finally consent to Jean-Christophe's institutionalization. The young David B. seeks solace in a vivid fantasy life, and the book's most visually spectacular passages depict his dreams, filled with mythical dream creatures portrayed in expansive panels reminiscent of Persian art. B.'s simple, economical drawing style--European comics artists don't share the American reluctance to apply a cartoonish look to serious stories--belies the work's structural complexities, such as flashbacks within the flashbacks to David's childhood. This journey through the wayward 1970s has universal appeal, such that many readers of this book will eagerly await learning where the subsequent decades took David B. and his family. --Gordon Flagg
Library Journal
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The latest entry in the graphic novel sweepstakes, from the publisher who brought us Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. Here, Frenchman David B., a founding member of the cutting-edge cartooning group L'Association, chronicles his brother's epilepsy. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
In his deeply touching graphic autobiography, B. shares with the world his family's struggles in search of treatment for his brother's epilepsy, and also presents an extraordinary portrait of the making of an artist, with the whole presented in an amazingly vivid expressionistic style. (LJ 3/15/05) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publishers Weekly
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The first half of French cartoonist David B.'s astonishing L'Ascension du Haut Mal appeared in English a few years ago, but this is the first time the whole book has been translated, and it's one of the greatest graphic novels ever published. Epileptic is a memoir of B.'s evolution into an artist, how learning to re-envision and recreate the world with his eyes and hands became his escape route from the madness and disease that might have destroyed him. B.'s family becomes involved with the shady alternative medicine world in France circa 1970 in an attempt to help his epileptic, unstable older brother. What B. picks up from that culture, from the military history he obsesses over and from his brother's cruel delusions is the raw material of his art: his stylized bodies and objects, which look like woodcuts and urn drawings, and especially his constant conflation of physical reality and symbolic value. With B.'s parents consumed with finding a cure, and his brother's quality of life deteriorating, B.'s dreams of a normal childhood are constantly undermined by his brother's illness, to be replaced by a waking and dreaming life filled with demons.This struggle becomes Epileptic's narrative core. B.'s artwork is magnificent-gorgeously bold, impressionistic representations of the world not as it is but as he's taught himself to perceive it-especially in the heartbreaking dream sequences near the end of the book. B.'s illustrations constantly underscore his writing's wrenching psychological depth; readers can literally see how the chaos of his childhood shaped his vision and mind. (Jan. 4) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Since cofounding the publishing company L'Association in 1990, David B. (i.e., David Beauchard) has moved to the forefront of international efforts to revitalize the graphic novel. With a distinct black-and-white palette he here tells a story that, though deeply personal, reflects on the past century's history. First published in six volumes as L'Ascension du Haut-Mal (1996-2003), this novel is an honest and frank autobiography of an Everyman and his epileptic brother. It speaks of the family's constancy in the face of adversity as they struggle with the illness and with the greater challenges of incomprehension from the medical establishment and society at large. Those studying the psychology and sociology of medicine and disease will be the first audience for this book, but readers interested in biography, comic books, and communications design will also appreciate it. In light of the success of the English translation of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2003)--which, like the present volume, was also initially published by L'Association--audiences in the US are well prepared to discover the work of David B., whose style so influenced hers. Epileptic successfully unites the tradition of the bildungsroman with the graphic novel, using the dream-inspired imagery that has long characterized David B.'s art. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All readers; all levels. J. E. Housefield Texas State University--San Marcos
Library Journal
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David B.'s acclaimed memoir centers on his brother's epilepsy and the family's struggle through numerous medical procedures and lifestyle changes to try to heal him. The artwork is moody and often intricate, reflecting the anguish caused by the illness and the wedge the disease creates between the brothers. (LJ 3/15/05) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.