He was one of the bridges between the art of comics and that of video games: the Belgian artist Benoît Sokal died on Friday, at the age of 66.
Born in Brussels, the tireless illustrator died in Reims after a long illness, his friend François Schuiten told AFP.
Fascinated by animals, the one who would become a designer for a long time imagined becoming a veterinarian before changing his path, deeply influenced by the watercolors of his compatriot René Hausman.
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After training at the Institut des arts Saint-Luc in Brussels, Benoît Sokal took off in 1978, between the pages of the review
To be continued
, where he made a name for himself at the helm of the twilight adventures of Inspector Canardo. , improbable cop debauched to women, cigarettes and alcohol. Very popular in the 1980s, the designer has devoted twenty albums at Casterman to this duckling, for which he also wrote the screenplay. He had completed the series in 2018, exactly forty years after the character's first appearance.
"Canardo is a very important series"
, testified for AFP François Schuiten, designer, collaborator and friend of Benoît Sokal.
“He's the perfect antihero, an insufferable alcoholic with a lot of flaws.
At the end of the 1970s, he is a character who will become one of the emblems of A Follow, which has revealed many authors ”
.
Addicted to all vices, Inspector Canardo made Benoît Sokal famous (detail of the cover of
Une bavure bien baveuse
).
CASTERMAN
A successful passage through video games
Curious about everything, the developments and the shattering progress of technologies related to video games from the mid-1990s did not fail to attract the attention of Benoît Sokal. This medium, which was until now limited by the reduced quantity of data that it could carry, opened at that time to much more ambitious works, in particular with the rise of the CD-ROM. His first title,
The Amerzone: The Explorer's Testament
, was released in 1999, with the support of the French from Microids. With this first experience, which he supervised from A to Z, Benoît Sokal is renewing his partnership with Microids for a second video game, the poetic
Syberia
, which was released in 2002 and which will have two sequels, in 2004 and 2017.
"In the world of video games, he had a very personal touch, a very original universe, it is quite rare"
, commented François Schuiten for AFP. A fourth entry to its
Syberia
series
,
in preparation since 2018, should be released later this year.
Despite his escapades in the world of video games, Benoît Sokal had not however put aside his love for physical albums and bookstore releases. Apart from Canardo, he had notably embarked - always with Casterman - in a trilogy
"with environmentalist accents"
, Kraa, published between 2010 and 2014. The designer had finally collaborated in recent years with François Schuiten on the first volume of the BD
Aquarica
, published by Rue De Sèvres in 2017. The release of the second volume, for which Benoît Sokal had almost completed the drawings, is expected next year.
"This nature lover marked the catalog's entry into adulthood with his satirical stories in which he brilliantly handles black humor and irony"
, testified Saturday the editor Casterman, who accompanied Benoît Sokal since 1978.