A venerable Mouse of the Guard
For the first installment of my BACKLOG OF DOOM comic book reading project, I chose Mouse Guard. I made the right decision to use this as a jumping off point!
What a pleasurable read! In the tradition of Usagi Yojimbo (which I have indeed read some of and will be reading more of for a future review), comes this masterfully told tale of the Mouse Guard, protectors of mousekind.
In doing my best to avoid any spoilers on plot, which is deftly written and beautifully drawn, I will say there is a bit of mystery, a bit of adventure, and is definitely a book almost anyone could enjoy. Just a note that young children might not get much out of the book, due to a bit of real violence and a perfectly twisty-turny plot. For everyone else, I encourage you to dig into the first book and don’t stop until you’re done.
Originally published as single comic book issues, the story is still on-going, with the fourth volume currently being published in installments. To keep things simple for this review, I read the first three stories as those are the ones available in collected editions, namely Fall 1152, Winter 1152, and Legends of the Guard.
The Mouse Guard has many heroes
A bit of discussion is in order here as it could appear from the artwork samples that we’re dealing with silly, anthropomorphized animals. While, yes, many of the main characters are mice, as the title might suggest, they are anything but silly. Instead, we have loyalty, depth, and strength in these well-rounded, charming and fully-realized, and very human, characters.
Author and artist David Peterson handles his cast in a way that belies his deep affection for them, and renders them with lovely details and a thoughtful approach to how the little world he has created works without getting ‘worldbuildy’ about the details. And did I mention that the pictures are gorgeous? The imagery starts strong and only gets better. Combining digital with traditional methods (which you can read a bit about on his blog), the whole book has a wonderfully evocative autumnal color palette.
The world itself is full of the stark and wild danger of the forest and set in a time much like our own medieval period. In other words, in the now-familiar time-that-never-was in a place-that-never-existed of many low fantasy tales. Fans of A Song of Ice and Fire will note the lack of sex and crude language, I mean it is an all-ages type of book, but the feeling of the environment is not dissimilar.
For me, David Peterson cannot put out the remaining issues of the fourth volume fast enough. I’m holding off to read it until the lst issue appears as the suspense would just kill me. If that’s not encouragement enough for you to hunt these books down, then I don’t know what will.
