Bilal: Legends of Today, released by Titan Comics on February 16, brings together The Cruise of Forgotten (1975), The Stone Vessel (1976) and The City That Did Not Exist (1977) in a 128-page hardcover.
Antagonised by an enigmatic character with supernatural powers, which serves as a theme for the trilogy, the three stories delve into the lives of various traditional communities (a village of the Landes, a Breton fishing port, a small working-class town in the North) as they fight against the police, the army, and all those in power, whose action, at the time, was very controversial.
Bilal: Legends Of Today is illustrated by Enki Bilal (The Nikopol Trilogy, Exterminator 17, Monster), in collaboration with Pierre Christin, the multiple award-winning comics writer. Bilal is regarded as one of the leading European comics creators working today, and his most famous work, The Nikopol Trilogy, has been released as both a videogame and a film (directed by Bilal) called Immortal, starring Charlotte Rampling.
Ten pages of interior art follow the jump.
[Based on a press release.]
Click for larger images.
Writer: Pierre Christin; Artist: Enki Bilal
Creator: Titan Comics; Hardcover, 128pp, $39.99, £35.99; SBN: 9781785868740
About the Creators:
Pierre Christin is a multiple award-winning comics writer. In 1967, he and Jean-Claude Mézières released the first of many Valerian adventures. From 1970 to 1980, with Pilote magazine, he wrote for various artists, including Tardi and Boucq–totaling nearly 60 comics–dealing with all kinds of themes, adapting his style to each collaborator.
Enki Bilal was born in the former Yugoslavia in 1951, and moved to France aged 10. At age 14, he met Rene Goscinny, and began to focus his attention on a serious art career in comics, starting with strips in Pilote magazine. The Nikopol Trilogy, his most famous work, took over a decade to finally complete, and has been released as both a videogame, called Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals and a film, directed by Bilal, called Immortal, starring Charlotte Rampling.
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I’ll have to give those Christin/Bilal collaborations another try – I read them in the ’80s in Heavy Metal during a period when Heavy Metal had unbelievably bad translations (or, I guess, believably bad considering that IIRC they didn’t actually have anyone fluent in French and so Ted White was just doing his best to edit someone’s half-assed translation into something that one might write in English) and I found that pretty distracting, a problem I didn’t have as much with Bilal’s solo stuff because his genre ideas and imagery were so wild that I didn’t care if the dialogue sounded clunky. Christin seemed a little more down to earth and I’m sure his stuff would read completely differently to me now as a non-teenager.