You Can't Cheat

WIVEL: What are the differences between autobiographical writing and other genres? What are the problems of working in the autobiographical genre?

DAVID B: It's always trickier than fiction because with fiction, you can always get yourself out of a jam. Fiction is no problem because you can do as you please. If something isn't working, you can always change it around. With reality, with your own life, there comes a point where you can't cheat. I have to tell certain things; I have to draw certain things that happened to me. When I construct fictions, if there are things I don't feel like drawing, I avoid them -- here I can't avoid them. If I don't feel like drawing cars, I can do a story that's set in the Middle Ages, or I can do a story that's set in the here and now but without cars. You have all the license you need. If, in Epileptic, I'm in a car with my parents, I have to draw a car. It's more restrictive and of course that's what's interesting, as well.

WIVEL: I was thinking of the personal aspect, too; the gulf between remaining faithful to what happened and not hurting those who are close to you. It must be a problem.

DAVID B: Yes, in some ways. With Epileptic I had quite a few problems with my parents, who just couldn't accept the story at all. I did try to be faithful, I don't know... It's my take on this story. That's what my parents rebuked me for, that in some way, I had no right to have my take on this story. I was supposed to not have seen anything -- I was little, and I was supposed not to have any opinions on the matter. But I did, even if I didn't express them. I wanted to do this whole story because I'd said nothing for so long, I'd enjoined myself from saying anything at all for so long, so as not to cause any problems for my parents. But at a certain point, it overwhelmed me. I quite clearly had a need to proclaim that I'd experienced something and this is what it was, from my point of view. It definitely did cause problems, obviously. But, well, if the choice is between doing that and not doing it, between confronting those problems and not doing so... I didn't see my parents for three years, because they were angry at me, and they didn't want to see me. Those are things that happen.

WIVEL: Still, it must have been hard.

DAVID B: Yes, of course, not seeing my parents was painful. But if I hadn't done it, it would have caused other problems with them. It would just have been a dodge.

WIVEL: Did you spend a long time thinking about doing something on this subject in comics form?

DAVID B: Yes, I'd thought about it for 20 years, but I wasn't quite sure how to do it. After the creation of L'Association, I said to myself, "OK, now you can do it -- you've got the publisher who can do it, you've got the ability to do it exactly the way you want to do it. You're at peace, you're free, now you can proceed." Fresh off The Pale Horse, which was sort of a precursor to something of an autobiographical nature. Even though it deals with dreams, it deals with autobiography. Because they're dreams that I had, there's a certain autobiographical aspect to it. I needed to do The Pale Horse in order to understand how I could translate my feelings into drawings. It was through dreams that I acceded to reality.

WIVEL: About your level of reflection, one gets the impression that it was highly evolved, even when you were very young.

DAVID B: This whole story caused a huge amount of problems. It was something that we absolutely couldn't wrap our heads around, of course, my sister and I, nor my brother -- and at the same time, we understood that our parents didn't understand it either. It's an illness that's not very well explained. There are lots of different kinds of epilepsy, so it posed a real problem and we realized after a while that the physicians had no idea either -- they were unable to cure my brother. That is to say, we had this idea that if you're sick, you go see the doctor and he'll who know how to cure you, and there, suddenly, that wasn't the case -- why were all those guys unable to heal my brother? We had to ponder this, to reflect upon this absence, the absence of the adults' ability to resolve these problems. Anyway, I tried to resolve all of this in my head in my own way, with all my talk about the war and things like that. We had to find reasons.

WIVEL: How did you reconcile your thoughts as a child with your present thoughts on the subject? Did this cause you any problems? When reading, one gets the feeling, now and again, that you're expressing present-day reflections rather than the ones from that time.

DAVID B: Yes, of course, there is some of that, and it adds to the mix, anyway. But I tried to do it in such a way that the reader understands when it's my thoughts as a child and when it's my thoughts as a grown-up. I demarcated the difference and I think the reader, as he reads the story, will understand it.

WIVEL: I also wanted to ask you about the relationship between the text and the images. The text is very sober, while the images are so charged...

DAVID B: Yes, I wanted to create a very "transparent" text, a very "transparent" kind of writing. There's no pathos in it -- I was showing all the pain, all the emotions, the whole symbolic aspect of it, in the drawings. That was what interested me. I didn't want to add onto that in the text, I didn't want to do any writing within the text, it just gives you the necessary information, while the images are what you see, what you feel.

WIVEL: Were you very conscious of the language, the words you were using? Did you work extensively on that part of it?

DAVID B: Yes, indeed. I write a lot; what I do is very heavily written. It looks very simple, but I think a lot about turning phrases in order to make it as simple, as efficient as possible. With some other comics I do, I take a more literary approach. I work more on the phrasing, I get more elaborate, but here I absolutely wanted to do it this way -- it was a choice, it really is a choice.

Within That Mystery

WIVEL: Epileptic also becomes a family saga -- there are stories about your grandparents, etc. Was that always the plan? What does it add to the story?

DAVID B: I didn't want to spend my time scrutinizing my own navel. I wanted to do something bigger. It was obvious that the memories of the family were important, too. Indeed, Epileptic is something that I built on three axes. I wanted to relate how my brother's illness turned the family's life upside down. I wanted to chronicle the life of this family as far back as I could go in my familial memories -- what my mother and grandmother had told me. And I wanted to chronicle the construction of my imagination. That was what interested me, to broaden the circle every time, to constantly add a more general, more human and more universal dimension to that universe. It was to move forward in concentric circles and be able to touch people around the world with this story. My case isn't unique, I'm fully aware of that -- in fact, what I want to show is that beyond all the specifics that I'm showing, my case is absolutely not unique.

WIVEL: But it's personal...

DAVID B: Yes, of course -- it's very personal, but you have to be as personal as possible in order to touch people. There is a maximum number of people who will recognize themselves in there -- they won't recognize themselves in every detail, but will be able to see where they are, what their place is relative to this. It's a signpost. In a way I'm saying, "OK, well, I'm here, we were there, my family was there, and you -- you can define where you are relative to that."

WIVEL: I wanted to ask you about your great interest in occultism and esoterism, which is evident throughout the story -- it's to a large degree through all of that that you constructed your imagination.

DAVID B: Initially, esoterism and occultism provided me with extremely important images when I was little. My parents were both drawing instructors and I loved to draw, I loved images and I looked at everything around me -- photographs, paintings and such, so when I came across this magazine Planète, I loved it, because it was unique and there were things in it that I'd never seen before. It was a heavily illustrated magazine with photographs, paintings, engravings, old things and contemporary things -- it was a reservoir of strange and fantastic images. And naturally, when you're a kid, you get the sense that you're discovering an entire world when you're looking at something like that, a world different from the one in the usual magazines. It had a huge impact on me and it contained this symbolic representation of the world that we spoke of -- surrealistic images and things like that. It was very captivating; it made a deep impression on me. It was a way of rendering the world that interested me more than just depicting reality straightforwardly and unimaginatively. It was a way of depicting feelings, sensations, symbols, and it delighted me right away. That's where, later, my drawing style would emerge from.

WIVEL: Why is occultism so fascinating to you, compared to other belief systems?

DAVID B: Because it alludes to another dimension, another possibility. That is to say that there are things that are hidden, a hidden dimension. And that's exactly what was going on with my brother's illness. One moment he'd seem normal, and then suddenly there would be a seizure that made him fall to the ground. So by necessity, in order to understand the discrepancy between these two states, which constituted my brother's reality, I tried to find the explanation in something that was within my frame of reference. I found it in occultism, more so than in clinical reality, because anyway, the physicians were incapable of curing him -- so I had to go elsewhere. That's what my parents did too, in taking macrobiotics, tracking down gurus, all that stuff. The reality had to be elsewhere. That's also why, when I was little, I'd invent friends who were fantastical characters. Children often make up imaginary friends who are friendly, such as heroes, but for me they were ghosts and demons, because that was my frame of reference. I needed friends who existed within that context. My brother's illness threw us into an alternate reality, and that was a problem for society around us, with which we had no way of reasoning, because my brother couldn't get any better. I'd accepted the fact that this was our context and we had to live in it, so we were on the side of the demons, on the side of mystery, on the side of night. It was a life choice.

From the point I realized that my brother would never be cured; we had to embrace it, we had to accept it. Because society rejected us -- when we played in the streets with our friends and my brother would have a seizure, what we experienced was instantaneous, total rejection. After a while, my friends' parents would come see my parents and tell them they shouldn't let their son outside and that they ought to put him "somewhere," and so on. We were perforce in our own world, so we were rejected. In some ways, being a kid, I found that much more captivating than reality. It was something good. Later on it was hard, I came to understand that it had cut me off from a lot of things. Anyway, there was pain.

WIVEL: It was a way of surviving.

DAVID B: Yes, it was a way of sectioning off my life, of understanding where I was, and also of breaking open my imagination. Since I was already drawing a lot anyway, esoterism provided an inexhaustible trove of images, a very rich and interesting one -- the alchemic engravings and all that stuff is something that you never get tired of looking at. It's not necessarily that you get attached to the ideas behind them -- it's more the shock of the image, the poetic shock of seeing this object where there's a whole bunch of stuff -- a fish flying in the sky, next to a cube, over an ocean where there's a guy who is drowning. You see? Hey, it's almost a comic-book panel! There's a story to it. When someone explains to you what it means, that's cool too, but at the time I didn't understand a word of it -- it was the poetic shock of the image, the graphic shock that transported me. It was extraordinary! I'd feel little surges of adrenaline when I looked at that, and as a matter of fact, I felt as if I was physically touching the problem that affected our family, the problem that affected my brother. And I'd say, "My brother's in there, within that mystery."

WIVEL: And the intellectual side of all this only came later?

DAVID B: The intellectual side came later, when I grew up. I acquired knowledge to the point where I no longer was only interested in the images, but also in the texts that accompanied them. The explanations. It's also from that point on, the moment you grow up, that the pain manifests itself. In a certain sense you're innocent when you're a child. You find simple solutions, very comforting ones. The pain comes the moment you try to explain and understand things -- that's when the pain turns fierce.

WIVEL: Occultism is a way of explaining the unknown, like religion -- what is the difference between the two?

DAVID B: I am in no sense a believer. I don't believe in anything at all, but there's probably something to it, the area of belief -- that much is certain. We all need to build ourselves a little personal religion or belief. The fascination with occultism springs from that, but to what degree I'm not exactly sure. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I'm not trying to analyze it -- in fact, it's a way of constructing your own "mise en scène." Like religious people with their holidays and religious ceremonies. I needed to mount my own ceremonies and build up my own symbolism -- and it's also there in the graphic work in Epileptic.

WIVEL: And you'll keep on exploring it in Nocturnal Incidents [Les Incidents de la nuit]?

DAVID B: Absolutely, that's really the theme of Nocturnal Incidents -- my love of books and my love of images, my love of paper and all of that.

WIVEL: And also in your albums for the big publishers, which contain all of that, but...

DAVID B: Yes, there's the album I did for Dupuis, Reading the Ruins [La Lecture de ruines], that's exactly right. It concerns a mad scientist. He's been driven crazy by the war, and he's trying to understand what war is. He believes that war is a piece of writing and it must be read -- the ruins are letters and can be read. And that's exactly the work I did through esoterism, assimilating it with what I was thinking in terms of my brother's illness. When my brother would speak or when he'd have a seizure, there was something to read in that. I saw this war and that's why I drew so many battles. To me that represented my brother's seizures -- that's self-evident. When my brother would have a seizure, there was a battle taking place within his body -- two armies confronting each other and throwing him out of balance. That's Reading the Ruins.

WIVEL: All your albums contain those elements, but what would you say are the differences between your albums done for Dupuis, Delcourt, or Dargaud, compared to the ones done for L'Association? Are they done with more of an eye toward the mainstream audience?

DAVID B: Yes, of course. I try to retranscribe what I've been doing in Epileptic in the form of fiction that is more accessible, even if the reader doesn't know anything about me. For the people who haven't read Epileptic there's no point in going into all of that. They have to be able to appreciate the comics on the primary level, and to do that I also construct them on the primary level -- like a plain old war story, for example. I construct these albums on several levels, and that way people who've read Epileptic can appreciate them on a different level than those who haven't read it. I do that even with the albums I did at Dargaud with Christophe [Blain]. In The Ogres, there are people who eat human flesh and who are possessed by a sort of killing frenzy -- it's another way of talking about the disease, of course.

WIVEL: Are there inherent difficulties in integrating these elements into a traditional adventure narrative?

DAVID B: No, quite the contrary, it's actually really interesting to add it into the mix. That's the thrilling part. That's why we do this work, to feed our fears, it's always a way of approaching them and there's no end in sight, anyway, approaching these problems from every possible angle. Since I started Epileptic I've written only about the disease and the problems it poses. With The Revolt of the Hop-Frog, same thing. There, it's everyday life that rebels -- in the case of my brother's illness, it's exactly the same. We were very peaceful, everything was going fine, and then suddenly... it was as if daily life itself was rebelling.

WIVEL: Do you think this adds something new to the traditional comics formats?

DAVID B: I don't know if I'd call it new. In fact, I think all cartoonists have been doing this without necessarily being aware of it. I do it consciously -- it's true that because of the nature of my story, I'm bringing something very specific to my stories.

WIVEL: Yes, I find there's a certain tone in your albums that is completely different from that of traditional albums.

DAVID B: Yes, because I'm also trying to shatter, to some degree, this traditional format. I want to tell my stories in a different way. In the wake of Epileptic, I do a lot of scenes in which I move from reality to fantasies and dreams, to things I've been told, to stories of my family, and so on. I do try to break open to some extent the linearity of the traditional story, to stir it up a little, to create breaks.

WIVEL: It brings to mind the structure of Epileptic -- there are lots of ruptures in it, lots of flashbacks, with different time frames, etc. How do you work on the albums? Are they done in a very controlled way, or do you proceed more intuitively?

DAVID B: It's very intuitive. Epileptic was assembled scene by scene. I'd work on one scene and then I'd move on to something else. It was like a wall being built brick by brick. The sum total of it is a bit dreamlike -- it's something that continually eludes me. Before getting to work I'd say, "OK, then, this thing is so much more important, I'll tell this like this..." And then as I'd be working on it I'd realize that in actual fact, it wasn't that important and it was something I could tell in one or two pages. On the other hand, there are elements that I didn't even remember which came back to me, and that ultimately took on a greater importance. It's very variable -- in order for it to be a living story, you have to roll with that. I do the same thing with my fictional stories; I start out without knowing how it's going to end. I know the story I want to tell, but I leave it open. I based The Ogres on the notion of the total destruction of a human being, of human beings who annihilate one another. It was a way of showing a complete genocide. That is, there remained no trace of these people whatsoever -- that was what I wanted to talk about. Afterward, all the events in the story came together bit by bit. And of course, it's also a way of talking about the pain in my family. There was something I wanted to express on that subject. I didn't know exactly what, and I didn't know exactly how to say it and so I said it like that.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #275.]