Comic artist Benoît Sokal passed away – De Standaard

Belgian cartoonist Benoît Sokal, known for the comic series ‘Canardo’, but also maker of famous video games such as ‘Amerzone’, passed away on Friday at the age of 66. This was published by Casterman publishing house.

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‘Canardo’, the private detective with a duck’s head, first appeared in the late 1970s in the Belgian comics magazine A Suivre, which got a Dutch-language counterpart a few years later with ‘Be Vervolgd’. In the early 1980s, Casterman began publishing the drink-addicted detective comic albums. More than twenty albums were eventually released, some of which have been translated into ten languages, culminating in ‘De extreme winter’ from 2018.

The Belgian cartoonist François Schuiten, a friend of Sokal, with whom he studied together at the Institut Saint-Luc, says that Benoît Sokal died after a long illness in Reims, France, where he had lived for several years. “Canardo is a very important series. He is the perfect anti-hero, an insufferable alcoholic, with many shortcomings. At the end of the 1970s, it is a character that becomes one of the symbols of A Suivre, which produced many authors,” says Schuiten.

Benoît Sokal made both the drawings and the screenplays of ‘Canardo.’ In the late 1990s, Sokal also successfully launched into the world of video games, with ‘Amerzone’ (1999) and the series ‘Syberia’ (2002), the third part of which appeared in 2017. He was still working on a fourth.

Benoît Sokal collaborated with Schuiten on the comic ‘Aquarica’ (2017). Together they worked for years on the screenplays of the first and second volumes of ‘Aquarica’. Sokal made the drawings.

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