Bilal, Enki

(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) Enki Bilal (born Enes Bilaloviæ on October 7, 1951) is a French cartoonist and film director. Born in Belgrade, Serbia (former Yugoslavia), he moved to Paris at the age of 9. There, at 14, he met René Goscinny and with his encouragement tried turning his talent to comic books. He worked on Goscinny's magazine Pilote in the 1970s, publishing his first story, Le Bol Maudit, in 1972. He began working with script writer Pierre Christin in 1975 on a series of dark and surreal tales. The Nikopol trilogy (La Foire aux Immortels, La Femme Piège and Froid Équateur) took more than a decade to appear but is probably Bilal at his best, writing the script as well as doing all the artwork - the final chapter, Froid Équateur, was even awarded the book of the year award by the very serious magazine Lire and is acknowledged by the inventor of chess boxing, Iepe Rubingh, as being the inspiration for this new sport. His latest publication has been Rendez-vous à Paris (2006), the third book in tetralogy (the Hatzfeld), this time dealing with the breakup of former Yugoslavia but from the future. 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 titled Rendez-vous à Paris (2006). His cinematic career has recently been revived with the expensive Immortel (Ad Vitam) which is his first attempt to adapt his books to the screen. The film has split critics, some panning the use of CGI characters but others have seen it as a faithful reinterpretation of the books