We are no longer whole.
I was never supposed to need another colorist again. One of the best would either sit right next to me or stay within Skype earshot for the rest of my career.
He drove the van the lot of us rented to get to the 2007 New York Con I came back from with our PUNISHER gig. The last time we spoke was over MSN, and we were planning to once again this year be stuck at U.S. customs making Statue of Liberty jokes; he, as a Frenchman, had to pay for the pleasure of getting fingerprinted by American border guards.
We were also planning to petition Marvel so they'd let us do an Ultimate Captain France book. There's a joke he had issues with in some other gentlemen's book, about the letter on someone's forehead not standing for France.
He had one constant fault as my model for the Punisher: he always smiled. No matter how steely and mean I told him to look, there was always an upturned corner I'd have to shave off his mouth in the drawing.
Our PUNISHER book shipped yesterday, four days too late for him to ever see it. As far as the official credits go, it will be the only book we've ever done together. The fact is, he never stopped being my model for the Punisher, and he and Olivier bent back double to keep feeding me reference photos throughout his time back in France.
He never said no. He always showed up. He could take the load.
I live in the first apartment he lived in when he got here. I train at the gym he used to go to. The first walk I took in Central Park I took with him.
At some point, he may have satisfactorily explained to me, out of the whole lot of them, why Cyclops?
I didn't keep many of his e-mails because they weren't supposed to become rare. In one of the only two I have, he promised to bring back a French-language copy of my first STAR WARS gigs. When he came back.
I bought the last seasons of both DEADWOOD and ROME. So I could lend them to him. When he came back.
There was not supposed to come a time when I'd cry at the tought of mispronouncing Monty Python.
There's so much I've just lost I can barely stand it.
There's so much I'll keep forever.
I hope I've made it clear while he could hear, how grateful I am.
Last weekend,
Stéphane Peru died suddenly of some congenital heart problem he never knew he had. He would've been 27 in three weeks, right after coming back here from wintring in Paris.
Tags: me, stephane_peru, studio
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