DAVID B.
Appearing with Italy's Igort for a signing and Q&A on Nov. 15. Presented by The Beguiling. 7pm (doors 6:30pm). Free. Rocco’s Plum Tomato, Plum Room, 585 Bloor W. 416-533-9168. www.thebeguiling.com.
Unlike many of his North American contemporaries, French comic book artist David B. has little regret for or conflict about perceiving the world as a garish fantasy. A co-founder of the seminal art-comics house L’Association (they were the first to publish Joann Sfar and Marjane Satrapi), B. previously had only one of his major works fully translated into English; happily, it’s one of the greatest graphic novels ever drawn. Epileptic chronicles B.’s life with his debilitated brother as a vivid myth, with each seizure a monstrous serpent and every quack healer a supernatural symbol.
The 19 illustrated dreams comprising the new Nocturnal Conspiracies are much slighter, though they share that hallucinatory method. Here, dream logic only makes the iconography more ambiguous. In his first story, for example, the cartoonist relates a dream about a French Resistance fighter, associating the man with fantastical beings like “the Veiled Prophet” and “the Hidden King” before scrawling deadpan that, “None of these characters really has any link with [the Resistance fighter], it’s annoying.”
B.’s stark style is ideal for material like this: he mostly leans on blacks and whites, and has a masterful sense of composition. The opening page of “The Attic” intricately mixes positive and negative space, drawing the reader’s eye towards the scene’s bloody focal point. Sometimes the perspective is so skewed that certain pages resemble abstract designs more than anything else. It’s fitting, as some dreams only leave us, whether we’re cartoonists or not, with shapes and outlines.