Epilogue: Returning

Extra Shot, my go-to café in Montpellier, closed in 2019. During the two years it was open, I often worked (and sketched) there.

A few months later, the owner of another café remarked while ringing up my espresso: "I saw you on Google Earth."

He'd been virtually exploring the city center, and spotted me on the former Extra Shot terrace as the Google van passed. (Google blurs faces, but my laptop, hat and backpack were recognizable.)

Strange as it is to see my ghost-image persisting on the Internet long after that café closed, I think what's more remarkable is that the person who spotted it was another barista.

The full text of page 305-A of my grandfather's memoir.

On Replay's first and last pages, I took the artistic license of drawing our family's Vienna apartment building in mirror image. In retrospect, it occurs to me that mirroring fits the book's theme; at the time, my reason was just that the panel layouts on page 3 and 4 flow better that way. Their apartment was actually on the block's southwest corner, not northwest, as shown in the photo below:

My grandfather took this photo on his first return trip to Europe with my grandmother after the war, in 1960. From his memoir:

"We had not seen Vienna for 22 years, and looked at everything with mixed feelings. Everything was so well known to us, and as to myself, I had the strange feeling that I had been away only for one or two weeks... In every man whom I saw in the street, if he was about 40 or 50 years old, I saw a murderer, and certainly a Nazi. What I especially hated was the friendliness, where the falsehood, the hypocrisy, could be felt easily.

One of my first trips was to the house where I had lived on Taborstrasse, also to the house of Hedy's parents. Both of them must have been partially destroyed by bombs, had partially new facades. I went into the house, but then, getting to the door, did not want to ring the bell and look inside. It would have been too exciting for me."

I couldn't have done Replay without the help of many people, books, films, online archives and other resources. I've mentioned a few throughout this annex. For readers interested in delving further, I'll add a short list of links and additional references at the bottom of this page. (Coming soon.)

Replay is currently available in French. The English edition will be released in March 2024. Pre-orders are available at the Replay book page, along with a special signed English edition. The French edition can be ordered online or found in your favorite bookshop.

To be notified about upcoming book signings, additional language versions, and my other new releases, you can subscribe to my free monthly newsletter below.

In drawing Replay, I took inspiration and reference from my sketchbook journal — a series of Moleskine notebooks I've filled with life drawings of my surroundings, family and friends since 2008. The stack below in particular, covering the period from 2015-2019, was invaluable in helping me draw Replay's present-day (yellow) timeline.

I drew the sketchbook page above while hanging out at my brother's house and my dad's apartment in New York over Thanksgiving 2018 (Replay pages 267-268, chapter 8). You can see how it came in handy for drawing Replay panels like the two below. (The first panel shows me in typical family-vacation drawing posture.)

Before tackling this book — and maybe as a psychological first step — I self-published a limited facsimile edition of my sketch journals under the titles Year 1, 2 and 3 in France. (I may complete the series with Year 4, but haven't gotten around to it.) The Thanksgiving sketchbook page above is from Year 3.

From time to time, I release limited-edition art prints based on my sketchbooks, Replay, or past video games. When I do, I announce them via my newsletter and social media. You can purchase art prints and books from the Artworks tab, and download free mobile and desktop versions of some artworks from the Library.

The journals I kept in the 1980s and early 90s while developing my first video games (and trying to break into screenwriting and filmmaking) have been published as The Making of Karateka and The Making of Prince of Persia.

Journaling is a valuable practice I recommend to anyone engaged in a creative project — to everyone, really. These days, I keep my journal in a compact Hobonochi Techo. Here's a link to my blog post about it.

For readers interested in my past games, the Games & Movies and Library tabs of this website have details about Prince of Persia, The Last Express, and Karateka. Updates about the current Ubisoft Prince of Persia game franchise can also be found under Latest News.

And if you enjoy adventure stories, check out the Books tab. I've written several graphic novels in collaboration with wonderful artists, including a modern Monte Cristo, historical Templar, and my latest release Liberty. (Some of these are available only in French, with English and other language editions coming soon.)

I hope you've found value in Replay and in this annex. If you think a friend might enjoy it too, please spread the word! The most important way anyone can discover a book is for readers like you to share it.

Shareable link to the Replay book page:

https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/books/replay/

Shareable link to the Replay Annex:

https://www.jordanmechner.com/en/library/replay-annex/

Coming soon!