Epileptic by David B.
Epileptic by David B.
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Reviewed by Jamie Coville
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I just got done with Epileptic by David B. yesterday. It's a biography that has a lot to do with the
David's brother who has Epilepsy.
Tom Spurgeon lists this book #4 in the top 50 books in 2005. Numbers 3 to 1 were comic strip reprint books. The start of the book is okay, as it talks about childhood and growing up which for some reason is interesting to me. Half way through it gets a boring and tedious. Then it picks up again towards the end. The boring and tedious parts were the endless parade of kooks and scammers trying to "cure" David's brother. At first it was interesting, but it feels like there are 10 different wonky versions of the same people and after 3 of them I lost my ability to care about what their fucked up world view is. That's when I put a bookmark in and waited a day to finished reading it. A part of me was miffed with the parents who appeared to be incredibly gullible, but after their first (and very scary) brush with modern science and a strong feeling of guilt I guess I can't blame them too much for grasping at straws to help their child. Especially when one method helped at first. After a while they seemed to have learned though. There is also a lot of stuff about David's dreams and career in comics, which felt a bit like masturbation and had little to do with the story of how his brother affected him. Some of it was relevant, some of it felt like advertising. There was a few pages where he drew a guy with a cat's face. It looked like he was trying to add a little Maus in there to garner more critical acclaim or something. It really stuck out because I don't recall any other character being drawn with an animal's head, except for people in David's dreams. I suspect he was trying to say something about that - the guy was supposed to be a martial arts expert and maybe a lot of who thought/said he was, was pure fantasy. But whatever, it wasn't very clever to make him Catman. The real life characters left a bigger impression on me than the work itself. Is David a good artist/storyteller? Eh. He's clearly good but I won't blow trumpets about his skills or the book itself. I come away from it strongly disliking David's epileptic brother. A part of me felt sorry for him because he does go through some shit that would fuck up anybody, but as an adult he turns out to be quite the douch bag. The dark side of me thinks somebody should have put a bullet in his brain a long time ago to save himself and everybody around him a lot of misery. Which is a harsh thing to say I know, we are talking about real people here, but the book shows him as contributing nothing positive at all to life and everything negative. Perhaps David is douch bag for presenting his brother in that light, but it could be accurate. I don't think I'd recommend the book to others. It's not that entertaining and after your done reading it all you come away with is loathing some people who live in France. There are better ways to spend your time.
Regards, http://www.TheGraphicNovels.com News and discussion on a free, Delphi like forum.
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E-mail: jcoville@kingston.net
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