In BILAL: LEGENDS OF TODAY, available today from Titan Comics, a mysterious, ageless, magical figure affects the lives of three separate towns by empowering the people to perform the miraculous in order to change their lives against the powerful.
The Details
- Written By: Pierre Christin
- Art By: Enki Bilal
- Letters By: Jessica Burton
- Translators: Mark McKenzie-Ray, Marc Bourbon-Crook
- Cover Price: $39.99
- Release Date: February 16, 2021
Was It Good?
Good is not the right word. A better descriptor would be ‘intelligent’ or ‘thought-provoking.’ This collection of 70s-era stories about a mysterious stranger who influences very deep, societal changes in three separate towns forces the reader to ask questions.
We’re confronted with the idea of overcoming our own preconceived notions about what could be or should be. The stranger represents the proverbial “magic wand” that can make the impossible happen. If a town is given the thing they want the most, when in reality they do all the work to make it happen themselves, what’s stopping us all from making our dreams a reality right now.
There are no answers with these stories. Only daydreams that may not be so far-fetched after all.
To get a sense of Bilal’s very particular art style, take a look at our exclusive BILAL: LEGENDS OF TODAY preview to see what’s inside.
What’s It About?
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
The collection is broken down into an extended prologue fronting the first story and three separate stories. The only connection throughout is the stranger, so we’ll look at each piece on its own.
The Prologue
We start with a collective of government and military officials gathering to review intel on one man. Through a series of photos and archival news footage, we see the man, clinically referred to as 50/22B, has been spotted near events of change over the course of decades. Protests, rebellions, strikes, and civil unrest from historical records show this white-haired man is present somewhere in the fray.
It seems impossible because 50/22B doesn’t appear to age over several decades of photographic evidence.
As the meeting progresses, a new usher quietly calls each official out of the meeting with the excuse of an important call or an urgent visitor. Soon, it’s revealed the usher is 50/22B, and each official he manages to get alone is overtaken by horrible visions of pain and monsters.
Eventually, only a few officials remain in the meeting before they realize something isn’t right. The meeting is ultimately destroyed in a catastrophic fashion and the search for 50/22B comes to a disastrous end.
The Cruise of the Forgotten
A small, rural village has fallen on hard times as a nearby paper mill spews smoke into the air and a nearby military camp isolates sections of the forest for secret experiments.
One day, the villagers wake up to find their houses floating a few feet off the ground. There’s some brief panic, but the villagers adapt to floating domiciles and almost take some delight in the occurrence as something new to take their minds off their general depression.
For each of these stories, sadness, depression, and that feeling of “nothing gets better” saturate the daily lives of each town. It’s an overwhelming sense of feeling powerless to stop whatever the government or the military or big business intends to do. Therefore, the stories focus on classism, the plight of the powerless, and what happens when the power that comes with class separation is suddenly eliminated.
What’s also inescapable is the heavy reliance on symbolism throughout each story. The townspeople lash their homes together to prevent their necessities from floating away. Eventually, the wind blows the town away to the coast and over the ocean, but the change of pace and scenery is so refreshing, the townspeople feel like it’s a pleasure cruise. The floating town comes across as the simple people being uplifted from their dreary station. The winds of change move them higher as they embrace the change rather than resist it.
We come to find the floating town is a result of some clever sabotage of the military camp’s anti-gravity experiments by 50/22B. Rather than simply destroying the experiment, he uses it to help people and create an “ugly” side effect for the military group at the same time.
The Stone Ship
Wealthy investors and business tycoons on a yacht survey a small fishing village they plan to convert into a tourist resort. The village has fallen on hard times (the recurring setup), and its residents feel powerless to stop the construction about to begin.
A key construction point is the ancient stone castle sitting on the cliff’s edge near the town. The tycoons intend to move the castle and make it a tourist attraction, however, their plans are thwarted by a blind hermit with magical powers living in the castle. Blind he may be, but he’s very proficient with a rifle.
50/22B appears as a deckhand on one of the town’s fishing boats who develops a camaraderie with the hermit. Together, they hatch a plan to move the villagers and thwart the tycoon’s plan to convert the legacy of the castle into a commercial gimmick.
Again, the lowest class of people are empowered to wrest control of their lives from those who exploit them and their history/culture. It’s a powerful statement about commercialism and the idea of a fundamental need to respect one’s culture and history.
The City That Didn’t Exist
This story projects the greatest amount of contrast in that the townspeople are not only empowered to change their station but when they’re given everything they want, the results don’t necessarily make everyone happy.
A small manufacturing town is feeling the effects of reduced wages, layoffs, and commercial competition. When the town’s patriarch dies, his fortune and business ownership fall to his ailing granddaughter. 50/22B has, of course, been operating as the granddaughter’s caregiver for some time.
The granddaughter immediately begins inspecting the town, the various companies her grandfather owned, and the people who run them. With the continual guidance and input of 50/22B, she begins restructuring every business to accommodate the townspeople’s personal investment in the prosperity and self-sufficiency of the entire enterprise.
It’s the realization of the socialist utopia culminating in a new, domed village that is a veritable paradise where everyone works, everyone is cared for, and nobody goes hungry. Having completed his latest achievement of a utopia for a town that wants it, he readies to leave. But some of the villagers decide to leave with him because their price for utopia is boredom and a collective refusal to allow the starting of new private business ventures. It’s a strong statement that collective prosperity and peace come with a price that some cannot live with.
Final Thoughts
BILAL: LEGENDS OF TODAY, available now from Titan Comics, uses mystical man as a common thread to explore what would happen with the social and political ills of life when the “common man” is given the power to negate elitist power in all its forms. It’s a deep and thought-provoking example of using the comic medium to explore the philosophy of everyday life and what it means to control your own destiny.
Score: 8.5/10
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