BILAL, Enki

(1951-)

   Yugoslav/French illustrator, a very distinctive, innovative and original creator of sensuous, decadent futures. EB was born in Belgrade, moving with his family to France in 1961. He attended the Academie des Beaux Arts briefly in the early 1970s. In 1971 he won a competition to create an sf COMIC-strip story run by the magazine Pilote, in which he subsequently published a number of strips later collected in book form as L'appel des etoiles ("The Call of the Stars") (graph coll 1974; vt Le bol maudit ("The Cursed Bowl") 1982). A further collection was Memoires d'outre espace (graph coll 1978; trans as Outer States 1990 US). In 1973 he met and teamed up with sf writer Pierre Christin (1938-) to produce 5 graphic novels: La croisiere des oublies (graph 1975; trans in Heavy Metal Apr-Nov 1982 as "The Voyage of Those Forgotten"), Le vaisseau de pierre (graph 1976; trans in Heavy Metal July-Nov 1980 as "Progress"), La ville qui n'existait pas (graph 1977; trans in Heavy Metal Mar-Sep 1983 as "The City that Didn't Exist"), Les phalanges de l'ordre noir (graph 1979; trans as The Ranks of the Black Order 1989 US) and Partie de chasse (graph 1982; trans in Heavy Metal June 1984-Mar 1985 as "The Hunting Party"). He collaborated with writer Pierre Dionnet to produce Exterminateur 17 (graph 1979; trans in Heavy Metal Oct 1977-Mar 1978 as Exterminator 17; 1986). In 1981 he began to write and draw an as yet unfinished trilogy, so far consisting of La foire aux immortels (graph 1983; trans as Gods in Chaos 1985) and La femme piege (graph 1986; trans as The Woman Trap 1986). In 1989-90 he collaborated with Christin on a series of reportage fictions from five different cities, under the series title Coeurs sanglants ("Bleeding Hearts"), for which his illustrations comprised photographs with additional features drawn or painted in. Since then (until mid-1992) he has published only a series of limited-edition prints.EB has collaborated with French film-maker Alain Resnais, providing set designs for La vie est un roman (1983; vt Life is a Bed of Roses), and contributed design work to Michael Mann's film The Keep (1983) and to the film version of The Name of the Rose (1986), based on the novel by Umberto ECO. He also directed the sf movie Bunker Palace Hotel (1990), a thriller set in the future and involving ROBOTS.

   RT

   See also: HEAVY METAL; ILLUSTRATION; METAL HURLANT.