Let's Peel
The Nikopol Trilogy
Created by
PERFECT if
Perfect if you want to wander through a world where gods and mortals share exhaustion, where memory rusts but refuses to disappear.
Style / Atmosphere
Concrete dreams and divine corrosion. Bilal’s universe is a city in decay — neon flickers on cracked marble, gods descend in spaceships, and humans try to love inside propaganda. It’s noir sci-fi painted with ash and melancholy.
Synopsis
“The future is already old, and the gods have nowhere left to land.”
The Nikopol Trilogy — composed of Gods in Chaos, The Woman Trap, and Equator Cold — unfolds in a near-future Paris where ancient Egyptian deities hover above political ruins. Alcide Nikopol, thawed after decades of cryogenic sleep, becomes both pawn and prophet in a theatre of dictatorship, rebellion, and divine boredom. Bilal paints apocalypse not as explosion but corrosion: technology failing slowly, faith leaking from concrete. It’s an allegory of power and fatigue — a mirror held up to Europe’s own ghosts.
Line Work
Fine ink outlines, cross-hatched restraint, and a cool blue wash give each frame the stillness of archival memory. The geometry comforts and confines — a hand trying to stay steady while remembering trembles.
The pacing
Carefully measured. Each panel holds its breath. Page turns feel like walking through long hallways: you sense the echo before the sound. Time folds in on itself — moments revisited from multiple angles until they align.
The Voice
Bechdel’s narration overlays the images like transparent vellum — analytical, ironic, tender. Text and image never mirror; they negotiate. Where her voice retreats, her drawings lean closer.
From Page
to Screen
Fun Home: A New Broadway Musical (2013, dir. Sam Gold) — a stage adaptation that turns Bechdel’s visual silence into song.
The comic’s symmetrical structure and literary layering influenced how Call Me by Your Name (2017, dir. Luca Guadagnino) and The Father (2020, dir. Florian Zeller) visualise memory as architecture — intimate rooms echoing with withheld truths.
Peel me a Book
Let's Peel
The Nikopol Trilogy
Created by
Style / Atmosphere
Concrete dreams and divine corrosion. Bilal’s universe is a city in decay — neon flickers on cracked marble, gods descend in spaceships, and humans try to love inside propaganda. It’s noir sci-fi painted with ash and melancholy.
Perfect if
Perfect if you want to wander through a world where gods and mortals share exhaustion, where memory rusts but refuses to disappear.
Synopsis
“The future is already old, and the gods have nowhere left to land.”
The Nikopol Trilogy — composed of Gods in Chaos, The Woman Trap, and Equator Cold — unfolds in a near-future Paris where ancient Egyptian deities hover above political ruins. Alcide Nikopol, thawed after decades of cryogenic sleep, becomes both pawn and prophet in a theatre of dictatorship, rebellion, and divine boredom. Bilal paints apocalypse not as explosion but corrosion: technology failing slowly, faith leaking from concrete. It’s an allegory of power and fatigue — a mirror held up to Europe’s own ghosts.
Line Work
Painterly, textured, unmistakable. Bilal’s signature palette — bruise blues, ochres, metallic greys — turns every surface into skin. His brushwork fuses realism with surreal disquiet; cities look alive, but just barely.
The pacing
Measured, dreamlike, cinematic. Long silences alternate with bursts of violence and politics. Pages feel like film stills — each one an echo of motion, each shadow a prophecy.
The Voice
Detached, ironic, poetic. Bilal writes like someone reporting from inside history’s hangover. His tone is mournful but wry, sceptical of redemption yet obsessed with its shape.
From Page
to Screen
Immortal (Ad Vitam)* (2004, dir. Enki Bilal) — Bilal’s own hybrid live-action/CGI adaptation; strange, haunting, half-beautiful, half-broken — exactly as it should be.
Its atmosphere resonates with Blade Runner (1982, dir. Ridley Scott) and Children of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón) — worlds where decay is philosophy.