As a kid growing up in New York, I dreamed of becoming a comic book artist. But the arrival of my first Apple II computer channeled my passion for visual storytelling in different directions. For the next two decades, enthralled by the challenge of creating video games (and more recently, with Prince of Persia, writing screenplays), I stayed involved with the world of books and comics only as a reader and fan.
Childhood dreams never really go away; they just go into hiding for a while. So I’m very excited to announce the publication of my first book – Solomon’s Thieves, an original graphic novel. I’m intensely proud of it, and of the spectacular work artists LeUyen Pham and Alex Puvilland have done. I hope fans of Prince of Persia and The Last Express will check it out.
Solomon’s Thieves is a swashbuckling adventure set in medieval France, based on the historical events of the fall of the Knights Templar. It’s the story of a group of outlawed knights who band together, Ocean’s Eleven-style, to pull off the greatest heist of the 14th century.
The story is fiction, but the history is real. I’ve been fascinated by the story of the Templar arrests and trial ever since I discovered it, years ago, in the course of research for The Last Express.
The 700-year-old military religious order of the Knights Templar is more popular today than ever, thanks to cameo appearances in modern-day conspiracy thrillers like The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure; but relatively few people know what really happened in 1307. The fall of the Templar order rocked the medieval world and church so deeply that its echoes still reverberate. It’s a scandalous story, told for the first time in a work of popular fiction in Solomon’s Thieves.
If you’ve played Prince of Persia, you can guess that I love old Hollywood adventure movies. I conceived Solomon’s Thieves as a romance in the spirit of Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers – to me, the all-time master at combining history, romance, and unforgettable characters into a ripping yarn.
I love LeUyen’s and Alex’s artwork. It’s fluid, human and expressive, yet grounded in scrupulous historical research. Alex comes out of Dreamworks Feature Animation, LeUyen is an award-winning children’s book illustrator, and I think the comics world will be amazed to discover what they’re capable of as a team.
Solomon’s Thieves (Book One of a trilogy) will be published by First Second Books in May 2010. You can pre-order it from Amazon here.
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