David B.’s cosmology in these two stories has the same axioms:
1. The eternal world is more real than the human world.
2. It is hostile to humans in its very nature.
This cosmology is a gnostic one in that the eternal world reveals itself subjectively and in pieces. Yet David B. seems ultimately concerned with the idea that it is precisely the illusory world that allows we as people to exist and to survive. Every incursion of the Real destroys us. Merely to touch the Real, as Ziska does at the end of “The Armed Garden,” is enough to blind one. People exist in the space between the Real and nothingness, condemned to see the world in lies and misunderstanding, and it is those fictions that form our very existence. Fictions keep the Real at bay, though it remains a constant presence. Hence the theme of compulsory, obsessive creation that underlies Epileptic.
In addition to gnosticism, it’s also a Hermetic metaphysic. Hermeticism thrives or dies based on the ability of its advocate to enthrall the aesthetic appreciation of the reader, and David B. is sublimely skilled in this regard. Hermeticism is particularly suited to the comics medium, just as Lull and Bruno communicated more intuitively and persuasively in their charts and graphics than they could in their writing.