Enki Bilal

Enki Bilal - Ulysses and Penelope - Original Lithograph

2012

Enki Bilal is a French-Yugoslavian comics writer and artist, best known for The Carnival of Immortals, initially intended as a stand-alone album, but whose success would result in two sequels, The Woman Trap in 1986 and Equator Cold in 1993. The three albums form the Nikopol Trilogy. On his own, he also wrote and drew The Monster's Tetralogy, the first book which was somehow anticipated on 9th November 1998, which is the publication date. Bilal often takes three years to finish one single album. While continuing to work primarily as a graphic artist and illustrator, he has directed three movies, Bunker Palace Hotel in 1989 (a parable on the collapse of dictatorships), Tykho Moon in 1997 and Immortal (based on the aforementioned The Carnival of Immortals and The Woman Trap) in 2004. As a bit of trivia, it's been theorized that Viral from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann was named after him, Bilal and Viral would be pronounced the same in Japanese, Viral pilots a mecha called the Enki, and his Leitmotif is called Nikopol.