At this point, I've got about 1/3 of David B's Epileptic left, but I feel I can confidently say that, barring a complete misfire on the author's part, this is one of the most impressive and harrowing comics I've come across in a long time. David B's series of six volumes about life with his epilepic brother was collected by Pantheon a little while back but it wasn't until I found myself with some random Amazon credit that I picked up the hardcover and for the first time since Watchmen found myself taking more than a day or two (oftentimes much less than an hour) to digest a graphic novel.Part of this is the density of the work - every page is crammed with panels, narrative, and dialogue - but some of it is the material itself. This is truly a mature, thoughtful work that makes the maudlin spandex drama of latter-day Marvel and DC seem like Sesame Street Does Pinter. Seeing the mother and father take their ill son to all manner of specialists, starting with the scientific and sciency-enough macrobiotic and straying into healers, psychics, and secret societies gets more and more painful as failure after failure gets racked up. Their helplessness as seen through David B's eyes allowed me to truly understand the toll that an illness like Jean-Christophe's severe epilepsy can take not only on its victim (bruises, scars, public scorn and ridicule,) but their loved ones as well. There's no wonder that our narrator escaped into giant imaginary battlefields or spoke to ghosts and animals whenever possible.
Speaking to Chris Butcher last night, I described the book as having psychic residue - it's a genuinely haunting experience in a lot of ways with art full of heavy blacks and thick lines only adding to the oppressive nature of the surprisingly candid narrative. It's odd that I find the art to be as rich as I do, as it utilizes many of the same techniques used in Sartrapi's works, which have utterly failed to do anything for me in the visual department.)
The force of will required for David B to examine his family and himself is more than merely impressive - it's downright miraculous and worthy of applause on its own, but when combined with a subject and settings as interesting as this it becomes transcendent. Compelling, gorgeously rendered, and most of all honest, Epileptic is well worth asking your local comics shop or bookstore to pick up for you.
Oh, and for those of you who don't care about quality comics and instead want to see a "WTF, John Byrne?" moment, there's this, provided by an anonymous spy, who found it over on the Albert Moy art site.
That should make up for the lack of a strip today, shouldn't it?
