About a month ago, I received a batch of the debut wave of graphic novels from First Second Books, a new division of Holt's Roaring Brook. And though Roaring Brook is ordinarily a kid's line, the First Second books is fairly mature in its outlook. Titles like J.P. Stassen's Deogratias, a brutal story about a young boy driven to madness by the Rwandan genocide, or Eddie Campbell's metafictional The Fate of the Artist set the tone. Even the one book aimed most squarely at kids, Lewis Trondheim's A.L.I.E.E.E.N., is filled with disturbing and violent imagery involving cute creatures (see left) speaking in indecipherable symbols (the gimmick being that these comics are from some unknown planet).

Now First Second has announced what may turn out to be one of its most lucrative ventures yet, and certainly one of its most youth-oriented: a series of graphic novels linked to the Prince of Persia videogame, which is also being turned into a Jerry Bruckheimer action flick. Calvin Reid of PW Comics Week gets the info in an interview with editorial director Mark Siegel, who says these won't be your usual crappy tie-in books: "In the U.S., comics based on videogames are usually just vehicles to promote the games. We're taking POP and creating an original graphic novel that is not an adaptation of the videogame nor of the upcoming movie, but a totally new work that lets us go back to the roots of POP and draw inspiration from many sources, including history and myth."