Benoît Sokal

Benoît Sokal
Benoît Sokal, at the Quai des Bulles festival in Saint-Malo, 2010
Born	28 June 1954 Brussels, Belgium
Nationality	Belgian
Area(s)	Writer, Artist, Colourist
Notable works	Inspector Canardo
Awards	full list
http://www.benoitsokal.com/

Benoît Sokal (born 28 June 1954 in Brussels) is a Belgian comic artist and video game developer, best known for his comics series Inspector Canardo, and the adventure game series Syberia.

Biography

Benoît Sokal was born in Brussels in 1954.^[1] He studied at the École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc in Brussels, together with many contemporary Belgian comic artists like François Schuiten. He began drawing for À Suivre magazine in 1978. He created the Inspector Canardo series, featuring a depressed anthropomorphic duck detective with a penchant for cigarettes, alcohol and femmes fatales, before working on other titles.

Later he joined the software developer Microïds and designed the adventure games Amerzone, Syberia and Syberia II (published by Microids, the adventure game label of Anuman Interactive). He then founded his own game company, White Birds Productions, where he created the adventure game Paradise published through Ubisoft.

Bibliography

The cover of La mort douce, an Inspector Canardo adventure originally published in 1982.

• Inspector Canardo, 23 albums, 1981- ; Casterman
• Sanguine, with Alain Populaire; 1988, Casterman
• Silence, on tue!, with François Rivière; 1990, Nathan
• Le Vieil Homme qui n'Écrivait Plus, 1996; Casterman
• Syberia, 1 album, 2002; Casterman (sketches and drawings for the game Syberia)
• Paradise, 2 albums, 2005-, artist Brice Bingono; Casterman

Video games

• Amerzone (1999)
• Syberia (2002)
• Syberia II (2004)
• Paradise (2006)
  • Last King of Africa (2008) (Nintendo DS version of Paradise)
• Sinking Island (2007)
• Aquarica (2008) (canceled)
• Syberia III (2017) (expected) ^[2]

Awards

• 1999: Prix Pixel-INA (category "Games") at the Imagina 99 festival, Monaco ^[3]
• 2002: GameSpy PC Adventure Game of the Year^[4]
• 2003: nominated for the Award for Best Dialogue at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, France

References

1. De Weyer, Geert (2005). "Benoît Sokal". In België gestript, pp. 162. Tielt: Lannoo.
2. "Syberia 3" is a PC, Mac, PS4, Xbox One, iOS and Android adventure game due to be released in 2016.
3. Overview of the INA winners Archived 8 January 2005 at the Wayback Machine.
4. GameSpy site

External links

• Sokal publications in (A SUIVRE) BDoubliées (French)
• Sokal albums Bedetheque (French)
• Benoît Sokal biography on Lambiek Comiclopedia