Comics from Across the Pond

I chose to read ‘The Nikopol Trilogy’ by Enki Bilal from our selection this week. In a nutshell the story was very weird. I loved the concept of futuristic, post-nuclear, alien inhabited Europe. Originally I thought the Egyptian god characters were just oddly specific aliens, but they were supposed to be actual, immortal gods. I still don’t understand why they were in Paris (besides “our spaceship broke down and oh by the way Horus has gone renegade).

The first section of the book captured my attention. I was curious as to what was going on and why the main character was significant. Bilal did this wonderful thing, by using a person who was in a time capsule, the reader also got just enough information about how this world functioned as it was explained to the protagonist.

The second section confused me as to if I was in the same storyline. It started out with a female protagonist in London. But then we got flash backs of a continuation from events and characters from the first chapter. These sudden cuts were very jarring. The change of protagonist sucked me out of the story, to be honest. I kept reading to see if Nikopol came back. He ends up falling in love with the female alien introduced. She skips around the world with Nikopol and Horus and ends up bearing Horus’s child, which is seen on the last few pages of the book.  

By the last chapter I was forcing myself to finish. I had to at least read to the end, which was strange as well. I am curious about what happens to Nikopol’s son, but the rest of the story lost my interest.

The art style itself was rather nice. I liked to harsh, bold lines that fit in with the war-ravaged world. On a serious comic note, I do not think the story would have held together without color. The details of the dialogue would have been lost to the reader. Actually, a lot of details would have been lost or difficult, such as hair color or body paint. The color looked like marker or a softer paint effect, and was very well applied.