Read This: Solomon’s Thieves & Prince of Persia

Although I’m not nearly as widely read in the genre as I would like to be, I’m a fan of the European graphic novel tradition known as bande dessinée, which Clive James has described as “an upmarket comic book,” which is an okay definition as far as it goes—I would specify that it’s a long-form narrative told in comics form and, generally speaking, outside of the superhero tradition. Rather than a series of comic book issues packaged together as “chapters” of a larger story, a BD commonly comprises a single, large-scale narrative, but that isn’t to say serialization never occurs—or, more to the point since I’m talking about Solomon’s Thieves, that stories can’t extend over several volumes.

Solomon’s Thieves is the first volume of a trilogy, written by Jordan Mechner and illustrated by the husband-and-wife team of Alex Puvilland and LeUyen Pham, which uses the 14th-century persecution of the Knights Templar, and the legends surrounding their lost treasure, as the springboard for a classic adventure yarn. There’s no occult conspiracy here; the long-standing rumors about the Templars are touched upon, but in a context that underscores the political intrigues within the French court that led to the order’s suppression. Although it’s somewhat frustrating that this volume, being only the first third of a larger story, is almost entirely set-up, it does an effective job of setting up the major characters and hinting at the dynamics that will unfold in future installments—and, in the meantime, there’s plenty of action: fight scenes like the one above, wild chases through the streets of Paris, and a pull-out-the-stops battle just before the cliffhanger ending. The artwork does a fine job of telling the story without calling attention to itself, equally effective in conversation and action scenes.

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2 August 2010 | read this |

Moore Moran, “The Truth Concerning the Pizza in Monterey”

Custom House Cafe stood on this spot, straddling
Pier and seawall like a fisherman gaffing catch.
It was here, in ’46 that Carolos brought pizza
To the country—hand-pounding his dough flats so fine
That when he spun them at the ceiling, light
From the harbor shone through.

At the great iron oven he would hand them out crackling,
Bubbling real Mafia mozzarella,
Tomato so fresh it sassed you all the way down;
Crust edges: buttery popover. Friday nights,
Ramirez and I downed two extra-largers per, hardly pausing
To pull on longnecks so cold chunks of ice

Still knocked around inside the bottles. Today
You can only get pizza at the franchise parlors in town
Where the freshest thing going is the waiters.
And nobody tosses anymore. Instead, they pancake
Their wheat-germy dough through rubber wringers
Lifted from old washing machines in the junkyard.

The Room Within is the second collection of poems by Moore Moran, which also includes “On Wyeth’s Below Dover,” “Ordinary Time in the Pews” (which has also been published as “Ordinary Days”), and “That Breakfast,” all of which were published in a chapbook by the New Formalist Press. It also contains “Late in the Night,” published in The New Criterion, and “Paris, After” and “Today in Time,” both of which were also included in Moran’s award-winning 1999 collection, Firebreaks.

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The poems in this collection were written over the course of more than five decades, along with other poems such as “Sleeping Beauty” (first published in 1956) and “The Mountain Desert” (1986).

1 August 2010 | poetry |