![]() ![]() Jean-Christophe commands the family’s attention as he deteriorates physically and mentally meanwhile, Pierre-François slowly descends into a madness of his own, less malign than his brother’s, but just as powerful. We see their parents drag the family around Europe for most of a decade in search of anything that might help Jean-Christophe-mostly mystical “miracle cures” from one alternative-medicine quack after another: Swedenborgian spiritualists, macrobiotic masseurs, Rosicrucian Templars. was a 5-year-old boy named Pierre-François Beauchard, fascinated by the history of warfare and just starting to draw, and his older brother Jean-Christophe began to have epileptic seizures. It is entirely, obsessively, mesmerizingly the work of a single visual artist, and its narrative is the devastating story of how his vision rose from sickness and despair.Įpileptic is a memoir that’s violently refracted through imaginary images. ![]() It’s neither cinematic nor literary: At every turn, it does things that only comics can do. The French cartoonist David B.’s extraordinary L’Ascension du Haut-Mal, just published in its entirety in English for the first time as Epileptic, supersedes the standard line, exactly as the best art is supposed to. ![]() The standard line on first-rate graphic novels is that they’re “cinematic,” or sometimes “literary.” That’s why a lot of third-rate graphic novels give the sense that they’re essentially storyboards for a movie pitch, or a prose story with pictures tacked on. ![]()
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