David B.

David B. (b. 1959, Orléans, France) is a French graphic novelist and one of the co-founders of the publishing collective l'Association, established in 1990 with Lewis Trondheim, Jean-Christophe Menu, and others. l'Association became the primary vehicle for the renewal of French-language comics from the 1990s onward, publishing work characterized by formal experimentation, autobiographical writing, and literary ambition.

David B.'s principal work, L'Ascension du Haut Mal (Epileptic), was published in six volumes between 1996 and 2003. It is an autobiographical account of his childhood and adolescence with a brother who developed severe epilepsy, and of the family's passage through a succession of alternative treatments and esoteric communities — macrobiotics, healing cults, Gurdjieffian movements — in search of a cure. His visual language — a richly layered line drawing in dense black and white, in which dream imagery, historical visions, and personal memory are placed on an equal visual footing — gives the work a quality unlike any other in French comics. The book received the Alph-Art award at Angoulême (the festival's highest prize) and has been translated into numerous languages. His subsequent works include Les Incidents de la nuit (a serial comic in twenty-six volumes) and collaborations with writers including Emmanuel Guibert.