Enki Bilal
Enki Bilal (born Enes Bilal; born 7 October 1951) is a French comic book creator, comics artist and film director. Biography. Early life. Bilal was born in Belgrade, PR Serbia, Yugoslavia, to a Czech mother, Ana, who came to Belgrade as child from Karlovy Vary, and a Bosniak 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 émigré. 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 ("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. 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?" (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), 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 13 May 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 20 December 2012 to 18 March 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. Bibliography. English translations. Comics in "Heavy Metal "Magazine. From its start through the 1980s 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 '90s, "Heavy Metal" readers had to wait until 2012 for another graphic novel feature from Bilal. Graphic novels Short stories Comic Book Albums. Since the late seventies, it were publishers NBM, Catalan Communications, Humanoids Publishing, and  Titan Comics that have released several albums by Bilal. A collection of short stories. Catalan Communications (NY publishing house). "Paperback books" Humanoids Publishing. "Hardcover, large format books" "The Bilal Library:" "(small format – 190 × 260 cm – paperbacks)" "Trade Paperback:" Titan Comics. "Hardcover, large format books" External links.