A short life of the author
David B. (born Pierre-François Beauchard, 1959) is a French cartoonist whose graphic memoir Epileptic (L’Ascension du Haut Mal, 1996–2003) is one of the towering achievements of the graphic novel form — a six-volume autobiographical work about growing up with a brother who has severe epilepsy, drawn in a dense, expressionist black-and-white style that transforms the experience of illness into visual mythology. If Art Spiegelman’s Maus demonstrated that comics could bear the weight of the Holocaust, David B.’s Epileptic demonstrated that they could bear the weight of an entire family’s interior life.
Life and Career
David B. grew up in a French family dominated by his older brother Jean-Christophe’s epilepsy. The condition was severe and treatment-resistant, and the family’s response — a decades-long search for a cure through conventional medicine, macrobiotics, acupuncture, faith healing, Georges Gurdjieff–inspired spirituality, and various alternative communities — consumed the family’s emotional and financial resources and shaped David B.’s childhood in ways he would spend the rest of his career processing.
He studied at the Atelier des Vosges in Paris and became a central figure in the French independent comics movement. In 1990, he co-founded L’Association, the publisher that became the most important platform for art comics in France — and arguably in all of Europe — during the 1990s and 2000s. L’Association published the early work of Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and many others. David B. was its artistic conscience — the cartoonist whose own uncompromising work set the standard that the publisher’s entire catalogue aspired to.
Epileptic (1996–2003)
L’Ascension du Haut Mal (literally “The Rise of the Grand Mal”) was published in six volumes by L’Association between 1996 and 2003, and collected in English by Pantheon in 2005 under the title Epileptic. The memoir traces the Beauchard family’s story from David B.’s childhood through adulthood, centered on Jean-Christophe’s epilepsy and the family’s escalating, increasingly desperate attempts to find a cure.
The book’s formal innovation is its visual language. David B. does not draw epileptic seizures realistically; he draws them mythologically — as monstrous creatures that invade the body, as battles between armored warriors, as seas of darkness that swallow the sufferer. His childhood fears, fantasies, and obsessions (with war, with history, with the grotesque) are rendered as literal presences in the images: dragons, soldiers, labyrinthine citadels that crowd the panels and compete for space with the family’s domestic reality.
The visual style owes as much to medieval illuminated manuscripts, Persian miniatures, and Japanese woodblock prints as to the European comics tradition. The pages are extraordinarily dense — every inch is filled with pattern, symbol, and narrative detail — and the effect is claustrophobic, which is precisely the point: the reader experiences something of the suffocating pressure that illness exerts on a family.
The book is not only about epilepsy. It is about how illness reshapes an entire family’s identity — how the healthy sibling lives in the shadow of the sick one, how the parents’ obsession with a cure becomes a form of madness in itself, how the alternative-medicine communities the family joins are simultaneously havens and cults. It is also a portrait of a childhood imagination — David B.’s obsession with war, with military history, with samurai and medieval knights — that developed as a compensation for the helplessness he felt in the face of his brother’s illness.
Other Works
The Armed Garden and Other Stories (2011) collects shorter works that extend David B.’s interests in war, history, mythology, and the grotesque. His work on the origins of the First World War, his collaborations with other L’Association artists, and his illustrations for various literary works demonstrate a range that goes beyond the autobiographical mode of Epileptic.
Best of Enemies (2012–2014, with Jean-Pierre Filiu) is a nonfiction graphic history of the relationship between the United States and the Middle East — a work that applies David B.’s visual mythology to geopolitics.
Themes and Critical Standing
David B.’s great subject is the relationship between interior experience and visual form — the question of how you draw something that cannot be seen (a seizure, a fear, an obsession) and make it as physically present as the furniture in a room. His answer — mythology, symbolism, visual density — has influenced a generation of European and American comics artists, including Craig Thompson, Anders Nilsen, and Eleanor Davis.
He is one of the most important figures in the European art-comics movement — both as an artist and as a publisher/editor who shaped the institutional context in which art comics could flourish.
Key Works
- Epileptic (L’Ascension du Haut Mal, 1996–2003, collected 2005)
- The Armed Garden (2011)
- Best of Enemies (2012–2014, with Jean-Pierre Filiu)
Collecting David B.
The French L’Association editions of L’Ascension du Haut Mal (six volumes, 1996–2003) are the true firsts and are collected as a set; a complete set in fine condition brings €100–€300. The Pantheon English-language edition (2005) brings $25–$60. David B.’s original art is museum-quality — his pages are among the most visually dense in comics, and originals are sought by both comics collectors and fine-art galleries. L’Association ephemera (chapbooks, exhibition catalogues) are also collected.