by Véronique Sina
In France Enki Bilal may be one of the most popular comics artists who specialised in the genre of science fiction during his lifelong career. Since the mid 1970s his work has been characterised by the presentation of bleak visions of the future in which ruthless conglomerates reign and governments as well as ecological systems tend to collapse[1]. Most often the protagonists of these dystopic visions are disillusioned and broken heroes whose adventures Bilal manages to capture with the help of his surrealistic artwork. In the following I would like to focus on one of those broken heroes – namely Alcide Nikopol, the protagonist of Bilal’s comic book series La Trilogie Nikopol (1980-1992) – in order to analyse the construction of masculinity[2] in Bilal’s work by showing how performative discourses of gender and media go hand in hand in La Trilogie Nikopol[3]. In this respect, ‘masculinity’ is understood as a performative concept, i.e. as doing masculinity. As the American gender theorist Judith Butler elaborates
Comics Forum 