Translated in French to English
Background of Study
Introduction
Enki Bilal, the son of a Czech mother and a Bosnian father, spent the first nine years of his life in Belgrade, where the ghost of World War II still haunted everyday life. The Bilal family moved to Paris in 1961, where Bilal was drawn to comics and cinema. He started at Pilote in 1972, making illustrations, covers and short stories. Three years later, Bilal met writer Pierre Christin, with whom he created several comics by combining comic strips with photos, including ‘Légendes d’Aujourd’hui’, ‘La Croisière des Oubliés’ and ‘Partie de Chasse’. Enki Bilal, the son of a Czech mother and a Bosnian father, spent the first nine years of his life in Belgrade, where the ghost of World War II still haunted everyday life. The Bilal family moved to Paris in 1961, where Bilal was drawn to comics and cinema. He started at Pilote in 1972, making illustrations, covers and short stories. Three years later, Bilal met writer Pierre Christin, with whom he created several comics by combining comic strips with photos, including ‘Légendes d’Aujourd’hui’, ‘La Croisière des Oubliés’ and ‘Partie de Chasse’.
To escape these tensions, Bilal sought refuge in sport, excelling in high jump, in learning and reading his second language, from Baudelaire to Hergé, and in drawing, especially comics. Through the Sixties, the weekly magazine Pilote magazine, home to Asterix, Lieutenant Blueberry and more, grew up with its readers, among them Bilal. He was fifteen when he took his pages to show editor René Goscinny, who was encouraging but urged him to finish his schooling first. Five years later, in 1971, after brief studies in literature and fine art and a series of dead-end jobs, he said to himself, “I’ll never be able to lead lives like these. I must succeed at what I like, comics.” He submitted a two-page colour story, inspired by the opening cavemen sequence from a favourite movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, to a talent contest run by Pilote and won in the ‘realistic’ category. At the prize ceremony, he was welcomed by the great names, his heroes, from the magazine, including Valerian artist Jean-Claude Mézières, who drove him there in his Citroen 2 CV. “I was really surprised by this camaraderie between comics creators.” The first of several of his short comics was published in Pilote in 1972; Bilal was the ‘new boy’ on the team
Apart from these and other occupations, like photo retouching and glass painting, Bilal published ‘Le Sommeil du Monstre’, the first installment in his Hatzfeld tetralogy, in 1998. He published the last volume of this series about the breakup of Yugoslavia from a future viewpoint, in 2007. Apart from these and other occupations, like photo retouching and glass painting, Bilal published ‘Le Sommeil du Monstre’, the first installment in his Hatzfeld tetralogy, in 1998. He published the last volume of this series about the breakup of Yugoslavia from a future viewpoint, in 2007.
Literature Review
Bilal’s stories are set in a magically orientated but realistic future after the Yugoslavian civil wars, giving Bilal the perfect setting against which to illustrate his fears. He further reinforces his views by his dark and shadowy style of drawing, in which color features largely for evoking emotions. The result of Enki Bilal’s efforts is a growing catalog of intense and atmospheric graphic novels. Bilal’s cinematic career was revived with the expensive ‘Immortel (Ad Vitam)’, his first attempt to adapt his books to the screen.
Bilal was one of the artists making a graphic contribution for ‘Pepperland’ (1980), a collective comic book celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Pepperland comic book store. In 1983, he was one of many comic artists paying homage to the recently deceased Hergé in a special issue of (À Suivre), titled ‘Adieu Hergé’.
For thirty years, Herakles Nikopol has floated alone in space, sentenced to cryo-preservation. When he finally returns to Earth, the year is 2023, and the world has been ravaged by two nuclear wars! But the strangest change in the world floats above Paris a giant pyramid, home to the recently returned Egyptian Gods, who would like to reclaim humanity as theirs, if only they could all agree
From Publishers Weekly:
The Nikopol Trilogy brings together three previously published volumes Carnival of Mortals, Woman Trap and Cold Equator all impressive works of imagination meticulously written, drawn and colored by European comics artist Bilal.
It’s the year 2023 and Alcide Nikopol has been revived from a state of suspended animation after 30 years orbiting Earth. In the meantime, the planet has suffered two nuclear wars, and France is ruled by the ruthless dictator J.F. Choublanc. The immortal gods of Egyptian antiquity have also reawakened to revive their rule over humanity, and they now hover above the crumbling technopolis of Paris in a massive stone pyramid/airship. Horus, the renegade falcon god, takes possession of Nikopol’s body, rendering him immortal, and concocts a conspiracy to overthrow the Choublanc regime. When Nikopol cracks under the pressure of Horus’s possession, he is reduced to muttering the poetry of Baudelaire while he wanders the halls of a mental hospital. “Woman Trap” picks up two years later in a war-torn London. Blue-haired news correspondent Jill Bioskop dispatches stories 30 years into the past using a device called a scriptwriter, while she takes pills to eradicate the bloody memories of men she has murdered.
In “Cold Equator” the story is further complicated as Nikopol’s son boards a train bound for Equator City, an African metropolis afflicted with a freezing micro-climate of minus-six degrees, but surrounded by desert and surrealistically populated by sub-Saharan wildlife. Intricate plot twists and stunning color artwork mark this work as both an extraordinary comics literary achievement and a crackling good story.
The World of “Phallocratic” Fascism and Alien Patinas
On election eve in the “politically autonomous and irredeemably fascist greater Parisian area,” two unusual events transpire that threaten Jean-Ferdinand Buglieri’s regime (Mussolini’s politics reimplemented) (5). A pyramidoid spaceship arrives inhabited by the immortal Egyptian Gods–Anubis, Bes, Thoth, Bastet, Sobek, et al.–who immerse themselves in unusual waters and play Monopoly. Their ship looms over the Parisian cityscape, a transformed urban environment characterized by layers and layers of decayed alien patinas, demanding fuel.
On a decrepit boulevard, a frozen astronaut plunges ingloriously from the skies into the filth, leg snapping upon impact. Horus, an exiled Egyptian immortal wandering streets seeking a way back into the pyramid, rescues the body from Buglieri’s militia. Thawed by Horus, the astronaut Herakles Nikopol wakes up in a truly alien future. Nikopol, a consciences objector in a conflict with the Sino-Soviet Coalition in 1992, last remembers his exile into space. Horus hatches a plan–he will co-occupy the mind of Nikopol–and reclaim his place. But Buglieri’s fascists stand in the way… and a nightmarish world reveals itself–a violent hockey game unlike any other, an Archbishop with a levitating crown and cherubs who reproduce at an alarming rate, cybernetic legs, metro stations inhabited by red cloaked cults, telepathic green-striped cats, an array of aliens that dwell in the Parisian mud, and an encyclopedic range of newspapers that indicate a linguistic slide mirroring France’s spectacular fall. On a decrepit boulevard, a frozen astronaut plunges ingloriously from the skies into the filth, leg snapping upon impact. Horus, an exiled Egyptian immortal wandering streets seeking a way back into the pyramid, rescues the body from Buglieri’s militia. Thawed by Horus, the astronaut Herakles Nikopol wakes up in a truly alien future. Nikopol, a consciences objector in a conflict with the Sino-Soviet Coalition in 1992, last remembers his exile into space. Horus hatches a plan–he will co-occupy the mind of Nikopol–and reclaim his place. But Buglieri’s fascists stand in the way… and a nightmarish world reveals itself–a violent hockey game unlike any other, an Archbishop with a levitating crown and cherubs who reproduce at an alarming rate, cybernetic legs, metro stations inhabited by red cloaked cults, telepathic green-striped cats, an array of aliens that dwell in the Parisian mud, and an encyclopedic range of newspapers that indicate a linguistic slide mirroring France’s spectacular fall.