Word: beauchard
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...Epileptic" mostly takes place during the late 60s and into the 70s, a time before MRIs and a greater awareness of brain disease. Faced with a medical establishment that could do little but shrug its shoulders, the Beauchard family explores every remote cure, from macrobiotics to mediums to exorcism. "I wanted to tell the story of our family and how the illness of my brother changed our family. Our life was different. We were a normal family in the 60s in France and this illness changed our lives," says David B. His near total recall of events that took place...
...character called The King of the World. Suddenly he feels permanently changed. As he becomes disillusioned with "doctors who can't heal" and "parents who know nothing," he seeks solace in the world of dreams, leading to a lifelong obsession. Excerpting various entries from his dream journal, Beauchard turns "Babel" into an explication of the birth of his interest in art as a way to give form to his nocturnal imaginings...
...Creating 'Epileptic'] was a therapeutic experience, but not only that. It was an artistic experience too," says Beauchard. Finding visual metaphors for intangible concepts became the driving force behind the book's creation. This dedication keeps it from becoming a maudlin disease-of-the-week experience. "I really wanted to work out the drawings. How can I draw and epileptic attack, for example. Is it possible to draw that with a pencil and a piece of paper?" His solution to that particular challenge is to depict his brother in coils of a fantastical snake, twisting him in knots. Beauchard...
...Beauchard has a decidedly different look than most every American comic creator, and most French ones too. "I have two kinds of styles influences: an influence from French comics and an influence from art," he says. "I was very impressed during the 1970s with French comics that were very high contrast black and white drawings by artists like Tardi or Hugo Pratt, who came from Italy. And I was very influenced in art by the expressionist work of George Grosz. I was not very fond of superhero books. For me comics are not so different from literature or movies...
...Getting "Epileptic" published, even in comic-friendly France, was tough. To do it Beauchard co-founded a collective of six cartoonists called L'Association in 1990. "As we weren't able to get published by other publishers we decided to create our own publishing house," Beauchard says. "It was immediately a success and this success grew and grew. And now we are not a 'big' publishing house, but among the little publishing houses we are one of the bigger ones." Making editorial decisions collectively, L'Association has published other authors besides the original six, including Marjane Satrapi, author...