In Chapter 6 of Reading Comics “David B.: Battle Against the Real World,” Wolk writes, “It’s a frightening transformation, so B. eases it with the magisterial assurance and grace of his line work, and the crisp, solid-black areas and feathery, wood-cut inspired etched patterns that balance each other’s weight.” As I read Epileptic, I was especially absorbed by the images, more so than when I read Pyongyang. Although B. used pen and ink to draw Epileptic, he manages, in many of his panels, to approximate the woodcut aesthetic. It seems as if, rather than adding marks to a blank page, he is cutting away the darkness.His animal illustrations especially bring to mind Fritz Eichenberg, whose woodcuts illustrate many folk and fairy tales. Images like the one on the top right of page 215 in particular seem a direct references to an Eichenberg’s “The Night Watch.” I’ll try to find this online.This week I was reading an interview with Eichenberg on his experience illustrating the works of Dostoevsky. Eichenberg says, “Dostoyevsky himself was: a man who was severely ill all his life. He was an epileptic. He overcame these things by pouring all his anxieties and his insights he gained through extreme suffering into his novels.” The interviewer asks “How did you express this in your illustrations…What graphic techniques or devices or representations of the figure and emotions did you hit upon?” Eichenberg then explains “Any medium where I could work from dark into light, or from black into white, with all the gradations – which is also symbolic procedure: a process which makes it possible for you to create life out of a void. As you face the blank woodblock or the darkened surface of a lithographic stone, you create life out of it by throwing with your first touch of the graver – the first touch of your etching needle, or razor blade. You create a source of life that spreads over the whole scene and picks out the main actors and the main emphasis on the certain interrelationship, usually, between two human beings.” I wonder about this “symbolic procedure”—how this might apply to David’s drawings in Epileptic? I suppose I see a kind of connection between the narrative and the illusion in the images that light was carved from darkness. Perhaps this tendency grew from B.’s years illustrating his dreams—dreams seem almost to necessitate a default of darkness.I wonder also if the tales, the martial history books David read as a child were illustrated by wood-cuts? Might the illusion of wood-cut be the illusion of an image created by force—the drawings of Jean-Christophe’s face during his fits of aggression, for example, seem cleaved out.Jean-Cristophe suffered the force of his disease, David funneled that same force into his drawings. The result is that the images seem less composed than revealed, it’s as if they were there all along for the excavating, which corresponds to David’s account of how this story surfaced. While David the character feels powerless to cure his family’s disease, the hand that chronicles “L’Ascension du Haut Mal,” seems armed and indomitable.
