First Second isn’t just the home of exceptionally enjoyable European graphic novels – and Gene Yang’s “American Born Chinese” and Grady Klein’s “The Lost Colony,” but you know what I mean – anymore, as Director Mark Siegel explained over at ICv2:
We have one very big project which is slated for Spring 2008, which is Prince of Persia. That’s based on one of the big video games, which is also a 2009 Bruckheimer/Disney movie with all of the executive team from the Pirates of the Carribbean. It’s a big thing; that game is a big franchise. It’s a really big, recognizable brand name game in America, in Europe and in Asia, with phenomenal sales figures… As I was getting First Second under way, I thought “Let’s see if we can track down this Jordan Mechner,” because I remember seeing the titles come up and it was Jordan Mechner’s Prince of Persia, 20 years ago. So I reached Jordan and we start talking. It turns out this guy is really interesting and is really a storyteller first, and he has these other projects and games… Jordan Mechner is an incredible fan of European comics, and we’re suddenly speaking the same language; he falls in love with First Second; and he went to Disney and renegotiated his contract to keep the graphic novel rights so that he could do it with First Second. Next thing we know, what I thought was going to be a seed for something to develop, we’ve got this potentially enormous project.
It’s not the first licensed project that First Second have produced, of course; Eddie Campbell’s “The Black Diamond Detective Agency” is an adaptation of a movie script currently in production.
