On the Gutter Zombie forums, Richard Isanove has a touching remembrance of colorist Stéphane Peru:
Stephane was an extremely nice guy who was really passionate about his work. Always wanting to improve and better his craft even though he was already a top notch artist. I met him last year at the NY Convention with Yannick Paquette and we bar-hopped until 5 am. It was kinda fun to have another french colorist around. At the time he was living in Canada. We kept in contact through E-mail afterwards.
About 6 years ago, two young brothers sent me pages of a comic they had created for a small french publisher and asked what I thought. I gave what I thought was some pretty constructive criticism and in return they wrote that maybe I should stick to American Comics because, obviously, I didn’t understand the subtleties of the French “bandes dessinees”. I was a little pissed off since I had spent a good couple of hours on my answer but I just wished them good luck and all but forgot about it.
A couple of weeks ago, I was at the Angouleme festival and I met Olivier Peru, Stephane’s brother, through Philip Xavier, another french comic creator. Stephane couldn’t make it because he was on deadline. After a few drinks, Olivier confessed that they were the two brothers in question.They were 20 years old at the time and were having their first comic published: they were kings of the world. He told me the exact same thing happened to them a little while ago and they realized how I must have felt. Stephane was so embarrassed about it that he never brought it up. We laughed about it and I was ready to send Stephane a mail to bust his chops. Of course, as soon as I got back from the Festival a truckload of work was waiting for me and I had to hit the ground running. I figured I’d just wait until things calm down. Yesterday, as I was finishing the last page, I got a call from Philip that Stephane had just died while he was visiting Olivier. Stephane got out of his chair, sat back down and never got up again.He was somewhat new in the American market but he was really driven and talented. He was a 26 years old athlete who worked out regularly. He signed an exclusivity contract with Marvel a few months ago, he just started on the new Iron Man series and was getting ready to maybe work with his brother on the upcoming 1603. He was living his dream and enjoying every moment.
It sucks.
