Jury

José Grandmont

Head of the graphical department at IMPS
Born in Nassogne on 9 March 1960.

An average student in all the subjects that did not interest him, this drawing and history enthusiast studied in the Comics department of Saint-Luc Brussels. As a fan of the American black and white illustration masters, this jack-of-all-trades created a commissioned, humorous comic which opened up doors for him at Studio Peyo. This was in 1988, and he then became involved in completing the ‘Little Smurfs’ album and working on the launch of the Smurfs magazine and the preparations to celebrate 30 years of the little blue imps.

After much toing and froing between merchandising and publishing (colouring Smurfs and Benoît Brisefer albums) he now acts as a link between the various studio components.

Jeroen De Coninck

Artist at IMPS

Born in Ghent on February 3, 1956, he is the son of painter Jef De Coninck.
He attended drawing classes at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at Dendermonde and studied graphics at the Higher Institute for Graphic Education in Ghent.
Joining Studio Peyo in 1991, he has illustrated many games pages, covers, ‘Smurf pranks’ and short stories for the Smurfs magazine. He has collaborated on the Smurfs albums since ‘Everything Smurfs by Itself’.

Miguel Diaz

Artist and scenario-writer at IMPS.

Miguel Díaz Vizoso was born in June 1969. A teacher by training, he worked in that profession for 10 years in a medical-pedagogical institute. Motivated by the example of René Sterne, a teacher who became a comic strip author with the ‘Adler’ series, Miguel took the initiative of contacting Sterne to find out more about his career path. This was very naturally followed by enrolment in the Comics department of Châtelet Academy of Fine Arts. In 2000, he learned that Studio Peyo was looking for an illustrator to work on the ‘Smurfs Magazine’. He was entrusted with producing games pages, strips and ‘Smurfisms’, for which he also wrote plot lines. Inspired by his experiences as a teacher, he suggested a story about the intrusion of a so-called ‘difficult’ child into the Smurf village. The album ‘A Child Among the Smurfs’ appeared in January 2007.