XXIII. âThere is only the past.â
Jordan Mechner, creator of the long-lived Prince of Persia video game franchise, released a graphic novel inspired by his games earlier this year through First Second books. A publisher swiftly becoming known for high-quality literary works, First Second usually releases imported works from beloved European cartoonists like Lewis Trondheim and Joann Sfar, as well as prestige projects from already-known talents like Eddie Campbell or Jessica Abelâthe idea of a video game adaptation coming from their publishing house, even a particularly well-marketed book like Prince of Persia (celebrating a major new game release), seemed something of an anomaly. However, unlike most adaptations of a video game into any other particular mediaâcinema having notably had trouble with the product so farâthis book turned out to be surprisingly well thought-out and often gentle in its storytelling. While hardcore gamers who came to the book out of curiosity may have been disappointed at the minimal level of swashbucklingâor, really, any of the superficial elements inherent to the âplatform gameâ video game mechanicsâthe book is a rewarding, if disposable, bit of fairy tale confection.
What makes the book work is not, strictly speaking, Iranian writer A.B. Sinaâs appropriation of Arabian Nights themes or the elegant simplicity of the linework by married artists LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland (one a noted illustrator of childrenâs books, the other an animator at Dreamworks), but rather their combined understanding of the medium that theyâre working in. For an adaptation, there is a distinctly notable tailoring of the story to the strengths of the comic narrative. Prince of Persia, the game series, has two primary elements to its story: first, that there is and has been more than one prince, each of whose story repeats throughout history (an element it shares on some level with the best-selling Zelda franchise) and second, that time is an integral element. At first, that time played out as a time limit that the player had to race; later, it took the form of a time-travel mechanic that allowed the player to rewind moves and gaffes mid-play. In the graphic novel, the stories of two heroic Princes of Persia are intertwined through history and told concurrently, and the idea of âtimeâ is played out in a myriad of techniques. From thematic elements concerning the impact of history on the present (at one point, one Prince must battle history itself, in the form of the dead rising), to the mechanics of how the story itself is told, the interplay of moments in time is kept at the forefront.
By telling two stories in tandem, vacillating back and forth, the most obvious method of playing with time and history is the juxtaposition of two moments in subsequent panels. This is a technique that was taken to perhaps its narrative limit in the two Dr. Manhattan chapters in Watchmen, where Manhattanâs near-omniscience enables him to see all of time at once. We view moments out of order and simultaneously on the comic page, a taste of how Manhattan looks at all of time. As Dr. Manhattan says:
âTime is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.â
One of the best comics of last year, Matt Kindtâs Super Spy, presented its series of vignettes and short stories out of order, and left it up to the reader to assemble the narrative itselfâit worked twofold, because the actual espionage plot was very much secondary to the examination of what the characters had become due to their profession, and also because the act of âdecodingâ that part of history placed the reader within the story, trying to piece things together along with the characters. In Prince of Persia, one of the Princes, who both enacts moments in history and inhabits them, has been drawing picture scrolls telling the story of the previous Princeâand by reenacting those moments and identifying with them, heâs making his artwork tell the story of two times, just as the book itself does. When heâs forced to leave his artwork behind, the story barrels forward along the secondary motif of the riverâthe lifeblood of any desert kingdom, water here is used to represent timeâthe chosen prince of the prophecies rises from the waters, coming out of history itself, and the site of his reenactments becomes the true kingdom.
The inside covers of the books are marked with a pair of maps, essentially bookending history with cartography. This is appropriate for comics, as, in their ability to display moments in time simultaneously, they resemble nothing so much as maps of time as opposed to place.
XXIV. â…The Big Kids TableâŠâ
One of Americaâs most favored sons in the world of comics, Chris Ware, tends to be lauded more for craft than for story, and itâs easy to see why: while an intensely skilled cartoonist, as a storyteller he is almost completely constrained by his style, a combination of emotional desolation and ironic detachment toward his own humor. While there is a certain degree of biting satire in portraying God as a superhero, a blatantly Superman-looking one at that, and then making that man a pathetic failure, the actual humor of it has no air to breathe because every other character in his works are similarly empty and broken. His best-selling Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Boy in the World was based in part on his real life confrontation with his father; his other major works feature the same tropes. If Ware shares one trait in common with Warren Ellis, the subject of this columnâs previous installment, itâs his tendency to approach the same subject again and again, yet each time with a pair of tweezers.
Ware has two techniques that have gained some deserved praise, however, with regards to the portrayal of history. The first is similar to the jumbled histories of Watchmen and Prince of Persia, in which Ware sums up moments in creative history in brief comic strips and then collects them together on the page like a crowded Sunday newspaper, allowing them to play off one another and create history in aggregateâa concept brought even further by David Heatley, whose recent book My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down features a pair of stories, one for each of Heatleyâs parents, in which hundreds of tiny one-note strips are piled atop each other in order to get a larger sense of each of them.