Epileptic
By David B. (Pantheon, $25)
Pantheon
Artist Beauchard sees his older brother chased by epilepsy through childhood streets.
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From suffering, art. Yet someone else's suffering is a different matter. Graphic novelist Pierre-François Beauchard takes up the challenge presented by his older brother, Jean-Christophe, whose chronically deteriorating health prevents him from telling their family history himself. Writing under his comic-book nom de plume, David B., Beauchard relates how his family suffered under the weight of Jean-Christophe's malady during the '60s and '70s, how the disease gradually became a presence of its own—almost a person—with a shape and personality like some monster in the night.
Young Pierre-François regularly meets with such monsters in the forest outside his home; Epileptic freely allows the boy's imagination to meld with the grown artist's pen. Long-beaked creatures and talking skeletons out of Mexico's Day of the Dead gather by moonlight with Aztec serpents, only their advice is no more consoling to Pierre-François than his parents' hippie homeopathic remedies are to Jean- Christophe. They try macrobiotic cults, New Age gurus, and Ouija-board séances with the same fervor that Pierre-François applies to his early drawings. ("Unbeknownst to me, this flood of absurdities takes root in my brain. Images are born.") Their loving yet increasingly irrational efforts for their older son make them pariahs, roaming from one charlatan to the next. The imaginary becomes their reality, and Beauchard's black-and-white line work is infused with such superstitions and the occult.
Varying from one to nine panels per page, his memoir loops back from boyhood incomprehension and resentment of Jean-Cristophe's condition to an adult's understanding of the difficulties his parents faced. As he depicts his brother, epilepsy becomes a mountain endlessly climbed, a slumbering giant, an invading army of Mongol hordes. His art is an escape from the oppressiveness of disease and family, but it's also a symptom. Yet he worries, "I wonder if I didn't smother him with my endless outpouring of work." With adolescence and numbing medications, Jean-Cristophe becomes an almost alien presence within the family—sometimes violent and in need of institutionalization.
The panels blacken and line strokes thicken at such times; during his seizures and outbursts, Jean-Cristophe's features grow and contort. He can no longer respond to or appreciate the delicacy of normal family relations or of his brother's art. Disease coarsens him, which both horrifies and inspires his brother: "He's drowning. He's my raft. I observe him. I study him. I cling to the idea of not being like him. But the bulwark is not always effective against solitude."
Feelings of survivor's guilt and disgust aren't always easy to distinguish when it comes to serious illness, and Beauchard attempts no such clean, easy distinctions in Epileptic. No artist wants to feed off misfortune, especially in his own family, but even if Beauchard would reject such base inspiration, in this book he's created something genuinely moving and inspired. BRIAN MILLER
Different Dances
By Shel Silverstein (HarperCollins, $29.95)
The cover of this prettily republished 1979 book of cutely smutty existential cartoons depicts a figure frantically clawing the air with six hands and sprinting on 10 feet. That about describes the perversely polymorphous career of the hardest- working boho bum the counterculture ever cultivated. Best known as a best- selling author of puckishly, sketchily illustrated books for kids like Where the Sidewalk Ends, Shel Silverstein (1930–1999) also copped a Grammy and an Oscar nomination by scribbling plays and movies for the likes of David Mamet and punny ditties for the Top 40 ("A Boy Named Sue," "Cover of the Rolling Stone," and "The Unicorn Song"), and served as the rare Playboy cartoonist not forced to draw moronically repetitive titty toons with groaner-pun captions.
In fact, Dances is mostly delightfully light on its fleet little feet. With a line as economical as a whip snap, Silverstein skewers targets in a deft, daft style that resembles Jules Feiffer and may have influenced B. Kliban (and, through him, Gary Larson). In fact, a cartoon included here about Jesus, centurions, and nail trouble is much like the one in Larson's unpublished notebook. Fans of his nervy PG kids' comics may raise an eyebrow at the Playboy-oid sexual brio of these brief sermons about swinging low, though they're prim by modern comix standards. They're gimmicky, like his pop lyrics, and Playboy Philosophy preachy: Moses can't carry the 20 Commandments, so he chips 'em in half, carries off the 10 we know, and omits the good ones: "Thou shalt not judge. Honor thy children. Thou shalt not lay guilt upon the head of thy neighbor." A blow job transforms the guy into a cloud led on a string by the smiling female. In "The Bank Robber," the robber works his way up to bank president before pulling off the heist. Bigotry is physically placed by a parent into a kid's head, and religious zealotry sucked out of the guru's skull by a straw. Several figures go through quickie life cycles with ironic results. Lovers do things symbolizing possessiveness (feeding a gal through a meat grinder; slicing off a man-of-her-dreams' appendages).
Silverstein's kids' art is precocious; his grown-ups' art is jejune. He's smarter than the average playboy, but still sort of simplistic and crass. When he's good in this collection, he's as good as "A Boy Named Sue." When he's bad, he's as bad as the Irish Rovers crooning "The Unicorn Song." TIM APPELO
