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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.A graphic depiction of illness. Comic book artist David B’s extraordinary memoir, serialized in France between 1996 and 2004, recounts a family life lived, from the 60s onwards, in the grim shadow of his older brother’s severe epilepsy. The disease is characterized both in strictly representational terms and in a more phantasmagorical mode as a vaguely Celtic dragon, writhing around panels and irrupting between them, glowering at David’s family from within his brother’s body.The family’s torturous quest for a cure, from surgery and macrobioticism to anti-psychiatry, spiritualism, and even alchemy and exorcism, is itself striking, but in concert with David B’s illustrative talents the effect is spellbinding. Depending on any given section’s tone, his chiaroscuro artwork shifts, at its extremes, from the severity of woodcuts to the hallucinatory warpings of Expressionism. The sum of these parts result in a whole that’s as exhilarating a work of art as it is a devastating account of lifelong illness. Epileptic by David B, out now published by Jonathan Cape.
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