Didier Comès
Didier Comès (11 December 1942 – 7 March 2013) was a Belgian comics artist, best known for his graphic novels published in the magazine "(À Suivre)". Biography. Didier Comès was born as Dieter Hermann Comès in Sourbrodt in 1942. Growing up in a small village in the Hautes Fagnes with a German-speaking father and a French-speaking mother, he defines himself as a "bastard of two cultures". He left school at 16 to start working as an industrial artist in a factory in Verviers, making his debut in the newspaper "Le Soir" with the comic strip "Hermann" in  1969. Four years later he made his first typical long story, "Le Dieu vivant", the first part of the series "Ergün l'errant", for the Franco-Belgian comics magazine "Pilote". In this story, like in most of his later work, the cinematic images take precedence over the story, which is fantastic, and centers around death and mythology. His breakthrough followed with "Silence", a harrowing story featuring a mute boy in the Ardennes after World War II. All these elements, war, mythology, troubled relations, witchcraft, animals, and death, often placed in the Ardennes, the region where he is born and lived, are  recurring themes in most of his later graphic novels, long unrelated stories in black and white. Comès was early on influenced by fellow Ardennais comic artists René Hausman and Paul Deliège, and would later become friends with his example Hugo Pratt. He died, aged 70, in March 2013.