Words, images intertwined for artist

• By ROBIN MILLER
• arts writer
• Published: Nov 23, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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A man stood in the audience the night before.

No one caught his name, and Rod Parker could only guess that he wasn’t a student. But none of that mattered, because the moment was stilled by what he had to say.

“Your book saved my life.”

The man admitted he didn’t know much about art, but that’s not why he was sitting among the crowd in LSU’s Life Sciences Auditorium listening to Pierre-Francois Beauchard’s lecture.

Beauchard is known as David B. to his fans, and there were plenty of people there that night to listen to the artist talk about his graphic novels, his technique and what and who inspire him.

And the person who inspired David B.’s most popular work, Epileptic, is his older brother Jean-Christophe. The story was first published in France as a six-volume series between 1996 and 2003. David B.’s publishing company, L’Association, combined the series into one volume in 2005.

It’s not really accurate to think of the book simply as a memoir or even to describe it as an autobiographical graphic novel. Graphic memoir is more to the point, for David B., of course, is both writer and illustrator of this story.

And one doesn’t work without the other.

“The words are as much a part of the image as the pictures,” he said.

He told this to a small group of people gathered at the LSU Museum of Art on Nov. 13, the night after his lecture at LSU. The museum has been showing original panels from his books in the exhibit David B.: My Story/My Stories, including those from Epileptic, since Nov. 1. The exhibit continues to Nov. 30, and the artist included a stop in Baton Rouge while on a short tour of the United States.

He’s been to San Diego, Boston and Chicago. He’ll go to New Orleans the next day. Oh, and don’t forget New York. All of which is nice.

But this story begins in France, where David B. grew up, where his parents opted to keep his brother’s epilepsy a secret while seeking out all possible treatments. Jean-Christophe refuses brain surgery in favor of an attempt at zen macrobiotics, consultation with a psychic, Swedenborgian spiritualism, magnetism, alchemy, exorcism by a priest and psychiatry, which is a different form of exorcism.

Jean-Christophe’s illness transforms his family’s life. Other children mock him, so the family moves to an isolated area, joins a commune and continuously tries to cope with the boy’s increasingly disturbing behavior, which alternates between passiveness and physical aggression.