A life of drama in comics

Readers in the West are still children of the Romantics, of Wordsworth in particular. Intimations of childhood are as important to us as the air we breathe. Unfortunately, the coming-of-age story, the tool we use to look back, is in a sorry state. It’s become the standard “look-at-me” story by which new authors prove their chops. We’re numb to it. And it rarely tells the truth anymore, anyway. Yet comics remain a pipeline to childhood. They make us feel. They thrill and embarrass us. They make the backward glance into a long, awkward stare.

The graphic novel “Epileptic” is a true coming-of-age story that is also a memoir: a disturbingly honest story about childhood that is unable to gloss over the wars that sit, as glowering monsters, behind the Western middle class. It is a retelling of experience that exists to bear witness, not to selfishly command attention. “Everyone has his own ghosts,” observes David B. “It cuts down on the envy factor.”

First published by L’Association, the French graphic novel collective behind Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” and published in English by Pantheon, “Epileptic” tells how illness destroyed David B.’s family. His older brother, Jean-Christophe, began having daily seizures as a teenager. His epilepsy, drawn as an Aztec monster, ravages the family, leaving his parents so guilt-ridden and desperate they will cling to any quack the 20th century can throw out. It turns his sister Florence into a suicidal poet. And it leaves the author emotionally crippled, ever more silent and, to paraphrase Pink Floyd, growing colder and older until nothing is very much fun anymore. “In legends, the hero will sacrifice part of himself,” says young David B., pictured among images of armor. “It’s as if I’d offered my tongue

Comics have been sneaking into serious literature for some time. T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway adored Herriman’s “Krazy Kat,” and R. Crumb has basically been canonized. Michael Chabon’s novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay,” which won a Pulitzer in 2001, is based in part on the book-length comic “The Dreamer” by Will Eisner, father of the American graphic novel. (Chabon also wrote the excellent screenplay for “Spider-Man 2.”)

But America, birthplace of the modern comic, is now behind the curve. Manga and anime are as big in Japan as Hollywood is here. From Speed Racer to Pokemon, manga and anime resemble Shinto icons and Buddhist saints re-imagined for postwar Japan, old gods come back to care for their children. France takes comics seriously as an art form, which means more stunning French graphic novels like “Epileptic” are on the horizon, and L’Association is primed to run off with comics the way the Beatles ran off with rock.

“Epileptic” begins when the author fails to recognize his older brother: “The back of his head is bald from all the times he’s fallen. He’s enormously bloated from medication and lack of exercise.” David B. remembers how he, Jean-Christophe and the gang staged rock-throwing battles against the much poorer children of soldiers who had recently returned to France from Algeria. They gossiped over whether the Muslim man at the construction site was a murderer. “With my brother, I put together my first book. It’s called ‘The Martyrdom of Florence.’ My sister is tortured on every page.”

David B.’s character fantasizes about his grandparents’ roles in wars around the world, including World War I and Indochina, while Jean-Christophe worships Hitler. Like “Maus,” “Ghost World” and “Persepolis,” “Epileptic” deals honestly with violence, class, racism and sheer cruelty.

David B. has written a book for the ill, for their families and for anyone who suspects that the desolation of illness is not far from that of war. Chronic illness and war are both trips too long and strange for words. Dignified Jamesian prose can’t tell the story, and Hemingway’s terse style sounds too much like conversations with fathers who fought, came home, drank and didn’t say much. Photojournalists have known since World War II what is only now dawning on literary types: the unbelievable events of the last century are best understood through images that seem unreal. That’s where comics come in.

Being ill grants freedom from reality: This is how Jean-Christophe avoids the world. David B.’s view of illness and violence maintains the shock and the desire for salvation that both carry for many families trapped in this experience.

A macrobiotic martial artist, Master N. (drawn as a large, dancing cat), cures Jean-Christophe. David B. writes, “He’s found a guru, a master. Someone to whom he can pass along his misery and who knows what to do with it.”

When Master N. is deported for practicing medicine without a license, the family undertakes a mazy tour through the crazier healing movements of the last hundred years: magnetists, psychics, Swedenborgians, an English plumber said to be possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan lama. Even the Rosicrucians show up. Dubious theorists arrive, offer false hope and leave, usually with fatter wallets. Power struggles ensue in two macrobiotic communes: “As soon as we’ve finished our leek fritters, we run off to play with the neighborhood kids ... [and] have chocolate and cookies.” The wise master who will save them never appears. The discipline they waste following crackpots and weirdos is immense and frightening.

The graphic novel is going through the same growing pains that the novel went through in the late 1700s: uneven sense of story arc, too much moralizing and a tendency to include far too many details. But already, “Epileptic” and “Persepolis” are mostly avoiding these traps, though “Epileptic” could use more of a sense of closure. It took the novel about 100 years to evolve from “Clarissa” to “Jane Eyre,” but with the Internet, and millions upon millions of readers, the graphic novel won’t need that much time to travel similar ground.

Hollywood has not completely caught on to the power of comics. The “Spider-Man” movies were well worth the price of admission. But the “Batman” movies were hit or miss. “The Road to Perdition,” from the graphic novel of the same name, was a valiant attempt that didn’t exactly come off. But the manga series that inspired it, “Lone Wolf and Cub,” was huge in Japan, where it spawned six movies. Comics may be the best chance American entertainment has to keep up with the post-punk-through-Pokemon set.

So far, Hollywood seems to think that the visual stimulation that audiences want refers only to fluff. Perhaps graphic novels like “Epileptic” will change its mind. In the meantime, many comic series, such as the intelligent and desultory “St. Swithin’s Day” or the sophisticated high school manga drama “Boys Over Flowers” and the social-biological thriller “Y: The Last Man” are plums no big-time producer has plucked.

“Epileptic” delivers drama in the style of existential tragedy: the quest without a guide. Jean-Christophe finally gives up, showing that there are more ways to die than physical death. One feels that’s what he wanted all along: the chance to be a child forever. Comics revisit this desire to surrender control to parents -- to superheroes, to authority -- much the way David B.’s older brother submits to being the eternal patient: no decisions to make, no troubling responsibilities. It’s an uncomfortable desire. But reading comics is not the same as becoming a child. It’s learning about childhood so you can grow up without dying inside. *