Active History

Alban Bargain-Villéger

Little known in Canada outside a small circle of aficionados, Enki Bilal is probably one of the most imaginative, talented graphic novelists alive. He is also a controversial, misunderstood figure whose work addresses deeply historical questions. Thus, this post offers a reflection on Bilal’s career and, more particularly, his perspective on the past and how it constantly collides with the present and future of humankind. I will also address two contradictions in Bilal’s approach to his craft, namely that he (a) “has no real interest in … the past”, and (b) that he believes that the events of the twentieth century irrevocably discredited communism as an ideology.[1] Indeed, a close reading of his work – whether authored in collaboration with Pierre Christin or on his own – tends to prove that a sophisticated sense of history pervades his work and that he is not as rabid an anti-communist as he thinks he is – or wants people to believe he is. Finally, an overview of Bilal’s graphic novels gives historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries fodder for thought, as his work (which spans the late Cold War era, the 1990s, and the post-9/11 period) does not confine itself to being a product of its time, but also constantly interrogates the past, the present, and the future.

Enki Bilal was born Enes Bilalovic in Belgrade in 1951, of a Slovak mother and a Bosnian father. When Enki was nine years old, the family moved to Paris, where his father had found a new job. It was during his adolescence that the young artist developed a taste for sketching, painting, and writing stories. In 1971, he made his breakthrough in the fine arts community, by winning the comics magazine Pilote’s “new talent” prize. Four years later, Bilal met Pierre Christin, with whom he collaborated on seven full-length books. Christin, born in 1938, soon became more than a partner in crime, as he took on a mentorship role. While the division of labour between the two men was well-established from the start, with Christin as writer and Bilal as illustrator, the omnipresence of history and politics in those early works had a major influence on the artist’s solo work. A leftist, albeit fiercely independent, thinker, Christin wanted to “introduce new topics [in the comics world], take a more adult-friendly approach at a time when the profession was still very conformist.” By contrast, Bilal has stated that he was never “really part of the world, of the culture he lived in.”[2] Soon, however, the illustrator metamorphosed into a deeply political artist. Continue reading →