Enki Bilal


Enki Bilal is a French comic book creator, comics artist and film director.

Biography

Early life

Bilal was born in Belgrade, Serbia, Yugoslavia, to a Slovak mother, Ana, who came to Belgrade as child from Karlovy Vary, and a Bosnian father, Muhamed Hamo Bilal, from Ljubuški, who had been Josip Broz Tito's tailor. When he was five years old, his father managed to take a trip and stay in Paris as a political emigre. Four years later, Enki and the rest of the family, his mother Ana and sister Enisa, stayed in Yugoslavia, and four years later they followed.

Education and career

At age 14, he met René Goscinny and with his encouragement applied his talent to comics. He produced work for Goscinny's Franco-Belgian comics magazine Pilote in the 1970s, publishing his first story, Le Bol Maudit, in 1972.
In 1975, Bilal began working with script writer Pierre Christin on a series of dark and surreal tales, resulting in the body of work titled Légendes d'Aujourd'hui.
In 1983, Bilal was asked by film director Alain Resnais to collaborate on his film La vie est un roman, for which Bilal provided painted images that were incorporated in the "medieval" episodes of the film.
He is best known for the Nikopol trilogy, which took more than a decade to complete. Bilal wrote the script and did the artwork. The final chapter, Froid Équateur, was chosen book of the year by the magazine Lire and is acknowledged by the inventor of chess boxing, Iepe Rubingh as the inspiration for the sport.
Quatre?, the last book in the Hatzfeld tetralogy, deals with the breakup of Yugoslavia from a future viewpoint. The first installment came in 1998 in the shape of Le Sommeil du Monstre opening with the main character, Nike, remembering the war in a series of traumatic flashbacks. The third chapter of the tetralogy is Rendez-vous à Paris, which was the fifth best selling new comic of 2006, with 280,000 copies sold.
His cinematic career was revived with the expensive Immortel, his first attempt to adapt his books to the screen. The film divided critics, some panning the use of CGI characters but others seeing it as a faithful reinterpretation of the books.
On May 13, 2008 a video game based on the Nikopol trilogy was announced titled Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals. Published in North America by Got Game Entertainment in August 2008, the game is a "point and click" adventure for the PC; however, the Lead Designer was Benoit Sokal and not Bilal himself, who was the art designer, along with Yoshitaka Amano, for the video game Beyond Good and Evil 2.
In 2012, Bilal was featured in a solo exhibition at The Louvre. The exhibition, titled "The Ghosts of the Louvre", ran from December 20, 2012 to March 18, 2013. The exhibition was organized by Fabrice Douar, and featured a series of paintings of "Ghosts", done atop photographs that Bilal took of the Louvre's collection.

Awards

The series was published in English sequentially in Heavy Metal Magazine, as stand-alone graphic novels and as a single volume collection.

''Nikopol Trilogy''

Comics in ''Heavy Metal ''Magazine

From its start through the Eighties Bilal was a frequent guest in American Heavy Metal Magazine. Many famous Bilal comics made their English debut in this period of the magazine. Although shorter stories appeared later in the Nineties, Heavy Metal readers had to wait until 2012 for another graphic novel feature from Bilal.
Graphic novels
Short stories
English titleDateIssueNoteNumber of pages
Crossroads of the Universe1977/07Vol. 1 No. 4reprinted in Greatest Hits 19947
The Death of Orlaon, or: Legendary Immortality1978/07Vol. 2 No. 3reprinted in The Best of 19824
Ultimate Negotiations1979/01Vol. 2 No. 94
True Tales of Outer Space: The Planet Of No Return1979/02Vol. 2 No. 107
Going Native1979/04Vol. 2 No. 127
The Road to Ruin1980/02Vol. 3 No. 10written by Pierre De La Varech2
Of Needle and Thread1980/04Vol. 4 No. 1reprinted in hardcover version of Greatest Hits 19944
Only the Plitch1980/05Vol. 4 No. 2reprinted in The Best of No. 2 198610
Amusing Stories Section: A Day in the Log of the City of Alger1982/08Vol. 6 No. 5written by Jean-Pierre Dionnet4
Enki Bilal Enters the World of Hardcore Science Fiction1983/10Vol. 7 No. 7Art gallery7
The Gray Man1984/09Vol. 9 No. 6reprinted in Greatest Hits 19941
Over the Wall1984Son of Heavy Metal4
The Leader's Surprise1997/07Vol. 21 No. 34
Mondovision1997/11Vol. 21 No. 54
Close the Shutters and Open Your Eyes1997Horror Special – Vol. 11 No 110
On The Wing1997/Fall20 Years of Heavy Metal – Vol. 11 No. 27
New York, 2000 AD.1998/01Vol. 21 No. 64
The Slow Boat to Vega'''1998/03Vol. 22 No. 14

Comic Book Albums

Since the late seventies publishers like NBM, Catalan Communications, Humanoids publishing have released several albums by Bilal.
NBM
A collection of short stories.
paperback books
hardcover, large format books
The Bilal Library:
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Trade Paperback: