Enki Bilal

• Born 1951-10-07

Enki Bilal is a French comic book creator and film director. 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 'Légendes d'Aujourd'hui', 'La Croisière des Oubliés' and 'Partie de Chasse'. Bilal is best known for the Nikopol trilogy (La Foire aux immortels, La Femme piège and Froid Équateur), which took more than a decade to complete. Bilal wrote the script and did the artwork. Quatre? (2007), 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 (2006). In 2017, he started the series Bug. His cinematic career was revived with the expensive Immortel, his first attempt to adapt his books to the screen. On 13 May 2008 a video game based on the Nikopol trilogy was announced titled Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals. Bilal was the art designer, along with Yoshitaka Amano, for the video game Beyond Good and Evil 2.