Last spring, I received an unexpected invitation. Jules Maeght, a printer and gallerist in Paris, had seen my sketchbooks online, and wondered if I'd ever tried copperplate etching?

I hadn't. For my 60th birthday, I blocked off four days in the calendar, and took up Jules' kind offer to experiment in his family's printing shop on the Left Bank, at 13 rue Daguerre. Looking up the metro route to get there, I thought the address sounded familiar— but from where?

As readers of my graphic novel Replay know, my grandfather Papi (a doctor) left a voluminous family memoir. His sister, Else Mechner, had been a painter in Paris in the 1920s. I checked the manuscript. Else had lived at 11 rue Daguerre, literally next door to the print shop I was now headed for.

Over our first coffee at Imprimerie ARTE, Jules and his crew showed me the view from their upstairs window. Across the courtyard (shared with a boulangerie, on a street bustling with food markets) stood the building from whose windows my great-aunt Else must have looked out at theirs a century earlier.

That morning, I sat in the courtyard and drew my view of Else's atelier, with a stylus directly on a copper plate. In the afternoon, we added two shades of aquatint (a process in which the printer turns a hand crank in a wooden box, letting a cloud of powder settle onto the varnished plate). The result was my first etching, 11 rue Daguerre.

Jules' instinct had been right. I was hooked.

For my second print, I chose a panel from Replay depicting Else as a schoolgirl, surreptitiously sketching passengers on the streetcar in her hometown of Czernowitz. (The sketching habit runs in the family; my daughter Jane and I both inherited it.) My cartoon is based on a more famous one by the great French caricaturist Daumier (1808-1879). A laser-engraving machine transferred a JPEG scan of my line art to a copper plate, hopping from 19th- to 21st-century technology and back again. I titled this homage to Else and Daumier Streetcar 1910.

My third artwork depicts a young woman walking down an Orient Express train corridor, in the Belle Epoque period when Else was an art student in Vienna. Players of my 1997 game The Last Express will know why I titled this print Anna Wolff. The grid layout of rectangular panels evokes the rotoscoping process our team used to create the animation thirty years ago, as well as the French comics and Art Nouveau lithographs that inspired us. The ARTE workshop, where craftsmen hand-ink copper plates and roll them through iron printing presses, was a perfect place to bring the game's mix of old and new technology full circle, back to ink on paper.

Print number four is inspired by another video game moment. In Shadow, I've pictured a climactic confrontation between Prince of Persia's young hero and his mysterious nemesis. The computer memory limitations that led to Shadowman's birth in 1988 (as described in this ArsTechnica video, and in Replay) are now history, but the insight that technical constraints can spark creative breakthroughs stayed with me. This copperplate etching with aquatint is adapted from a watercolor I did last year. (The original hangs on the wall of game developer Neil Druckmann, who co-created The Last of Us.)

Chappaqua — Dome House (drawn directly on copperplate) shows my childhood home, where I played and programmed my first computer games on a 1970s Apple II, in the woods north of New York City. It's where Prince of Persia (and many of my other projects) began.

These five prints will be shown at Galerie Maeght (42 rue du Bac) in Paris next Thursday evening, 6 February 2025, along with my sketchbooks and other recent work. I'll be there from 5-8 p.m. to chat (and sign books) in a very pleasant setting, with French wine on hand. If you're in the neighborhood, please stop by and say hello.

For those unable to come on Thursday, the artworks can be seen (and purchased) online at Galerie Maeght, and at my website. The limited editions of 35 or 40 are split between the two sites; if you find a print sold out at one, try the other. Both ship internationally.

Else Mechner's artistic career was cut short when she returned to Czernowitz in 1931, leaving her paintings behind. Hitler, Stalin and World War II ensued; she never saw Paris again. Thirty years later, after Else's death, Papi tracked down her former landlord at rue Daguerre, who agreed to ship the canvases to New York in exchange for the unpaid rent.

One of her paintings, entitled "The Prince," impressed me particularly as a child; Papi often showed it to me when I visited. His love and pride in his sister's work was evident. I think he'd have been happy about the unexpected chain of events that led his grandson back to her Paris atelier and inspired new artworks in her honor. I'm sure he'll be there in spirit next Thursday.