BENOÎT SOKAL (SYBERIA SAGA)

He studied at the École Superieure des Arts Saint-Luc in Brussels and, in 1978, began his career by drawing comic strips for the Belgian newspaper À Suivre. It is to him that we owe the comic series Inspector Canardo, published today by Casterman: the protagonist of this comic is an anthropomorphic duck who, with the vices of smoking and alcohol, works as an investigator. The first issue dates back to 1979 and over the course of his career, including very recently, Sokal published other stories related to this character. He was among the pioneers who ventured into color comics through the help of computers: in 1996, he launched his first video game titled Amerzone, after discovering and interacting with the world of 3D. Sokal was one of the first cartoonists to design, implement, and oversee the entirety of a video game. Since the late 1990s he has become famous for the creation of video games and, in particular, for the saga Syberia. For this grandiose project, the artist follows each step: design, scenery, game design, construction, graphics, and dialogues. He received, for the “Games” category, the Prix Pixel-INA at the Imagina Festival (1999), Monaco, and was awarded to the Phenix Awards (2002) as personality of the year and he won the GameSpy PC Adventure Game of the Year (2002) for the Syberia video game. He founded, together with Olivier Fontenay and Michel Bam, his first production company, White Birds Productions (2003). For Glasstress Gotika at Fondazione Berengo (2015), Venice, Sokal exhibited the glass piece Off to the Land of Syberia 3.