By Kate Isenberg

"There is no order in this world, poor brother, since nothing can cure you," David B. writes in Epileptic, his autobiographical graphic novel. This admission of powerlessness comes after more than 300 pages – thousands of black-and-white panels detailing the author's struggle to accept his older brother Jean-Christophe's epilepsy. Their childhood in Orléans, France, begins with David (then known by his given name, Pierre-François Beauchard) making sense of his world in familiarly youthful ways: scrapping with neighborhood kids, listening to bedtime stories, drawing pictures of soldiers in battle. Jean-Christophe's first seizure casts a shadow on this familiar domestic scene, then recedes like a child's bad dream. But after witnessing subsequent, increasingly severe seizures, which stir the Beauchard family's alarm along with their sense of helplessness, David comes to see the border between normalcy and nightmare as being as malleable as the ink lines that compose Epileptic's obsessively detailed panels.

Epilepsy is the narrative spool on which the book's title, plot, and subplots wind, so one might expect, having read it, to be able to describe a seizure. But to David, the event defies words. The panel showing the onset of Jean-Christophe's first seizure (which happens while the two brothers are playing on a parked motorcycle, a scene that recurs in the author's other comics as an icon for childhood innocence lost) is wordless. The speech balloon coming from Jean-Christophe's mouth contains only an ellipsis, drawing attention to the loss of words. Even having witnessed Jean-Christophe suffer three attacks a day for many years, David calls a seizure "impossible to describe, it must be seen. I get tangled up in the words." Following this statement is a picture of himself "speaking" an ellipsis in a speech balloon, as if the memory of his brother's tangled limbs still leaves him tongue-tied.

The mystery surrounding Jean-Christophe's illness spurs the adults around him to search for its scientific or spiritual roots. The Beauchard parents appeal to doctors, acupuncturists, psychics, and existentialists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; the myriad prescriptions include neurosurgery, macrobiotics, compresses of magnetized cotton, and "catalyzers" installed throughout the Beauchard home to rid it of bad vibrations. As each regimen fails to cure Jean-Christophe's seizures, the various experts appear increasingly misguided, if not entirely absent. Macrobiotic gurus turn out to be petty crooks or suicidal depressives; Sartre and de Beauvoir don't reply to Mrs. Beauchard's letter of inquiry. The young Pierre-François realizes that his parents, once comforting purveyors of bedtime and dinner-table wisdom, can neither explain what's happening to their son nor resolve their own morbid fears, much less make everything all better. As Pierre-François concludes, "Adults propose extraordinary things that fail to produce anything."

From Huckleberry Finn to Holden Caulfield, it's common for the young man of a bildungsroman to train his childlike observational honesty on adult "phoniness." An alchemy of awareness and romanticized innocence characterizes the resulting first-person narratives, which stand as declarations of independence (if not complete maturity). In Epileptic the relationship between self-expression and independence can be seen in how Pierre-François's coming of age differs from that of Jean-Christophe, whose immaturity, physical weakness, and faltering communication skills become inextricably entangled. In an argument over who gets to write down the "history" of their neighborhood gang, Pierre-François defers to his older brother (then around 10 years old). But once the boys hit puberty, Jean-Christophe loses his firstborn authority. At family dinners he tells "pathetic little stories" of tasks he did without help (buying a soda, making a friend), which a healthy teenager might not bother to remark on. While struggling to achieve basic competence, he craves the power of dictators like Stalin and Hitler. A skilled illustrator before his seizures became more severe, the teenage Jean-Christophe "can't even get it together to draw a stinking swastika" anymore, and must (unsuccessfully) pester his mother and younger brother for help.

Pierre-François matures in deliberate contrast to his older sibling. Whereas Jean-Christophe fantasizes about being a dictator, Pierre-François renames himself David in a (murkily explained) "symbolic act" of identification with Jews, American Indians, and other groups he imagines as embattled underdogs. He calls his frustration about Jean-Christophe's epilepsy "a rage inside me that I mitigate with my constant drawing" of battle scenes, monsters, and animal-human hybrids. He finds illustration "infinitely more rewarding than [the] spiritualism" of his parents, an armor "to prevent my brother's disease from reaching me." At 18 years old, Jean-Christophe, who spends his time lying on his childhood bed while David applies to art school, tries to tear up some of David's drawings. For David, their sibling rivalry has become an epic battle against physical passivity, the emotional coddling of their parents, and an unexamined mind, all of which he sees as contributing to his brother's worsening condition. In contrast, Jean-Christophe wants to devote his adulthood to writing books that recapture the magic of fairy tales. This determination gives birth to the idea for Epileptic, in which epilepsy takes the form of a serpent that winds through Jean-Christophe's life and bursts from his mouth (as he asks, "Why me? Why?"), like a dragon that no hero can slay.

It would be too simple to say that, by putting his own interpretive spin on Jean-Christophe's illness, David triumphs over it. On the contrary, the book's most analytical passages have the tinny sound of rationalization. About Jean-Christophe's reading Mein Kampf, David editorializes: "There's nothing particularly Nazi-ish about his reading, it's just an act of provocation against [the family] and amounts to an admission of powerlessness." As words fail to describe a seizure, no analysis can sum up Jean-Christophe: after 40 years of the disease, a man grown dull eyed, slack jawed, moustached, obese, skin scarred from falls during seizures, yet still full of possibility, with "all the faces in the world flickering" across his own. The book is most powerful in presenting myriad, even contradictory representations of illness as electrical discharges in the brain, a virulent serpent, a tall mountain to climb, a loss for words, or a refusal to face adult responsibilities. Over the decades he spent preparing the material for Epileptic, David came to see his brother's condition as "another way of telling stories." No single image or one-liner can do it justice.

Kate Isenberg (www.kateisenberg.com), a San Francisco-based writer and illustrator, is the author of the comic strip Stewball.

Epileptic
By David B. Pantheon, 361 pages, $25.