NIKOPOL TRILOGY, THE 445
celebrated at the Angoulême festival, a year later Bilal himself was awarded the Grand
Prix at the 1987 Angoulême Festival, and the third part was picked as best book of the
year by the important literary magazine Lire.
Perhaps due to his bicultural upbringing, Bilal is an excellent builder of strange but
fascinating worlds. Th is trilogy lays the foundations for his later work; most of his fi lms
and his comics would refer in one way or another to the universe created in the Nikopol
Tr i l o g y , most explicitly in Immortel (ad vitam) (2004), which is a very free fi lmic version
using some characters and scenes from the trilogy but placing them in the new setting
of a futuristic New York.
Th e fi rst part of the trilogy was for the fi rst time published in English in Heavy Metal
as Th e Immortals’ Fete (1981), while the complete trilogy was published in a single volume
by Humanoids Publishing in 1999. In addition to the Nikopol Trilog y , Bilal has created
other science fi ction comics, such as the Monstre Tetralogy (1998, 2003, 2006, 2007) and
Animal’z (2009). As of 2009 he had also directed three feature-length science fi ction fi lms:
Bunker Palace Hotel (1989), Ty k h o M o o n (1996), Immortel (ad vitam) (2004).
Selected Bibliography: “Enki Bilal Interview.” Th e Comics Journal 129 (May 1989).
Pascal Lefèvre
