Enki Bilal

Enki Bilal (born Enes Bilal; born 7 October 1951) is a French comic book creator and film director.

Bilal was born in Belgrade, PR Serbia, Yugoslavia, to a Czech mother, Ana, who came to Belgrade as child from Karlovy Vary, and a Bosnian Muslim 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.

Enki Bilal has no sense of belonging to any ethnic group and religion, nor is he obsessed with soil and roots.

He said in one interview: "I also feel Bosnian by my father's origin, a Serb by my place of birth and a Croat by my relationship with a certain one to my childhood friends, not to mention my other Czech half, who I am inherited from mother".

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.

From its start through the 1980s, Bilal was a frequent contributor to the American Heavy Metal magazine.

Many notable Bilal comics made their English debut in this period of the magazine.

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.

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.

Quatre? (2007), the last book in the Hatzfeld tetralogy, deals with the breakup of Yugoslavia from a future viewpoint.

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 Marc Rutschlé 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.

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

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.

Paperback books

Hardcover, large format books

The Bilal Library:

(small format – 190 × 260 cm – paperbacks)

Trade Paperback:

Hardcover, large format books