larissatrabach

Wow, I think I need to (and want to) read this a second time. David B. weaves a dense fabric of imagery, replete with semi-esoteric symbols, a personal bestiary of fantastical creatures, ghosts and demons, and a visual vocabulary that enmeshes the reader. Even with several reads I bet the visual vocab would still be at least partially opaque, but never to the detriment of the storytelling. I shudder to think of how much drawing work went into this 360-page beast of a comic--this represents a Stuck Rubber Baby level of dedication to a project. I actually expected to be much more upset by a story of a family's fight with a son's chronic epilepsy, since I've been on-scene for two upsetting seizures - once with a work acquaintance who was not really recovering from traumatic brain injury and once when my partner seized on the street. The experiences really distressed me once they were over, and I was worried that this would invoke them. But, to my surprise, the depictions of epilepsy in this book didn't bother me at all. Maybe because the comic's depiction doesn't have the same feel of a live seizure, it's just a few still pictures of a curled-up boy. For me it didn't capture the terrifying effect of a lucid, functioning human being suddenly losing all control, as if there are ghosts that animate us and they can disappear at any horrifying, inexplicable whim. (Funny, to me a seizure is less a metaphor of being possessed by a ghost than being dispossessed by one; the loss of control and descent into tremors is the fearful part for me.) Or maybe it's because the way David B. drew the seizures was so unrealistic, with many, many cartoony or iconic elements (a line of drool going straight down instead of realistic saliva froth, the boy's nose drawn like a bottom-heavy cucumber or eggplant, the epilepsy depicted as a demonic, aboriginal-style dragon-snake), that it didn't evoke my life experience. But the drawing was deceptively cartoony and iconic. The characters were simplified, the world generally existed in chunky blocks of black and white, but David B. really did something that I didn't feel like Marjane Satrapi or Rutu Modan could do with their simplified drawing styles: he could switch into density of image and design at will. His battle scene drawings or his depictions of the dense streets of Paris or his overlapping pastiches of spirit-creatures were never realistic, but they were masterfully evocative and eye-dazzling. The theme that moved me most was his expose of people's total venality: macrobiotic food commune-dwellers engaging in mini-Soviet power struggles or the intrusive judgments of strangers on the street as they witness the brother's seizures. This was best executed in the first third of the book, with the stories from the macrobiotic communes and the description of the rat-like food store owner and commune founder who says she wants to heal but mostly profiteers, abuses her immigrant worker, and jealously, viciously guards her hippie business against any real or perceived competition. In David B.'s drawing she morphs into a rat. The child's-eye view of the communes and alternative communities is great, he really has an eye for how the totalitarian instinct pops out in the post-60s efforts at escape from corrupt society. I feel like the early 70s was a really terrible time in that way, although I wasn't there to see it, so I may be imposing my own view. He tells of characters who punish children for sneaking off to eat raspberries (too much yin in fruit, apparently), dominate others, split off into radical factions and generally act like douchenozzles. The utopian impulse apparently always ends in venal, pitiful ways, time after time. It also gave me a little more empathy for the chumps who go in for any pseudo-mystical crap, from Rosicrucianism to numerology to alchemy to Eastern mysticism marketed to Western rubes. Magnetists, psychics, esoteric symbologists all claim that they can help and the parents, apparently gullible as can be, go in for each swindle. David B.'s parents are in desperate agony trying to save their son -- they take whatever they can get. It also gave me a lot more sympathy for people who latch on to Hitler or Stalin figures, as the epileptic brother does in his mental effort to fantasize some sort of control over his life. The fascist or totalitarian sympathies may not represent real politics, but such a hurtful lack of control in the person's life that they grab any sort of vision of the dictator's power, having a need for order in a severely disordered life. David B. seemed harsh on his brother. A lot of the time he is judging and condemning him for refusing to fight the disease, he really hammers his brother's acquiescence. That was a bit off-putting, but he couldn't really tell the story from his brother's perspective, could he? The middle third of the story kind of slowed down for me, I don't know if it was too chronological or what. Maybe the theme wasn't evident, whereas I thought the first third could have been called "People Are Venal Fuckbags" and the last third could have been called "I Try To Make My Own Life," I didn't really know what the the middle was about, except that it consisted of things that actually happened. And the chronological order of events might have made it too detail heavy -- I liked early on when he gets distracted telling the story of his family, his great-grandparents and grandparents, then interrupts it with his mother saying he'll confuse or bore his reader with all this jumping around. That really worked for me. It might have been nice to have some sort of chapter breaks, but that might have forced him to delete pages that stayed in because there were no blank pages. It was a little disorienting not to know when one chunk of story was supposed to be ending and another starting, it just wound on like a comics version of a run-on sentence. But these are all minor complaints and not really complaints at all, just observations. Is it just me or does a lot of French writing seem to be extra-focused on finding the logic behind things, behind people's various behaviors? I mean, even more so than in other cultural writings? Maybe I'm full of shit, but it seems like explanations of a philosophical bent seem to always crop up in French lit, oratory and art. The title in French is so much more thematic and effective: "l'Ascension du Haut Mal," which means "The Rise of the High Evil." "Haut mal" being a reference to what in English we call a grand mal seizure.

2022-10-29 03:41