Bilal: Legends of Today, Hardcover

Legends of Today brings together the first three volumes that Enki Bilal has created in collaboration with the scriptwriter Pierre Christin: The Cruise of Forgotten (1975), The Stone Vessel (1976) and The City That Did Not Exist (1977).

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.

An endearing panorama of the generous utopias of the time, nourished by modern fantasy and a certain humor that still preserves freshness today.

Pierre Christin is a multiple award-winning comics writer. In 1967, he and Jean-Claude M zi res 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.