Benoît Sokal (28 June 1954 – 28 May 2021) was a Belgian comic artist and video game developer, best known for his comics series Inspector Canardo, and the Syberia adventure game franchise.

[1] According to him, his grandfather was an Austrian General of the cavalry of Ukrainian Jewish origin who had fled to Belgium in 1939 with the help of a German officer he knew since 1914, crossing all of Eastern Europe while surviving the Nazis.

[2][3][4] Sokal studied at the École Supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc in Brussels, together with many contemporary Belgian comic artists like François Schuiten.

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.

[2][4] Later he joined the software developer Microïds and designed the adventure games Amerzone, Syberia and Syberia II (published by Microïds, the adventure game label of Anuman Interactive).