Epileptic (L'Ascension du Haut Mal)

David B. recounts growing up alongside his brother’s severe epilepsy. The family pursues different treatments while the artist develops a private imaginative language to understand what is happening.

The French series began in 1996 and ran across six volumes before complete English collection.

The memoir refuses to reduce illness to a single lesson. It examines care, frustration and the ways a sibling’s life is shaped by another person’s condition.

Its visual invention makes inner experience part of the testimony.

This is family memoir and psychological nonfiction. Alternative cures, hope and disappointment form a long pattern.

The book asks how a child makes meaning when adults cannot promise a cure.

David B.’s bold black-and-white figures transform illness into monsters and symbolic forms. Decorative density gives dreams and fears a physical presence.

The style makes the family’s emotional landscape visible without pretending to be a medical diagram.