3 out of 5

Themed anthology books are a favorite of mine, and I love when a fictional universe is solid enough in construction to start passing it out to other creators for one-off tales.  These Mouse Guard shorts – 3 or 4 per issue in a four issue series, with linking material by MG creator David Petersen – have some cute moments but rarely strike on anything beyond one-note fables that we’ve read in other formats.  Unlike the series proper, which takes a fantasy setting an absolutely molds it into a world which can only be the Mouse Guard world, many of these tales could have the characters swapped for any other animals – or humans, or whatever – and read the same.  That’s not to diminish the art (which runs a wonderful gamut of Archaia stars and some indie faves) or the talent it takes to compress a whole story into a short space, just to say that only a few people actually add to the world, and seem to appreciate that the title is ‘…of the Guard’ and not just meant to be stories about talking mice.

The setup is fair: we’re at June’s tavern, our hostess promising any mouse’s tab paid if they can tell the best yarn, with the rules that it neither be all truth or all fiction and not have been told ’round the tavern before.  My favorite came from an unlikely source, as it was a pretty sober tale from the writer / artist of the totes kooky ‘Cursed Pirate Girl’ Jeremy Bastian.  He writes up a potential start to the tradition of cloaks and the guard itself, perhaps not chosen as the winner of volume 1 since then Petersen couldn’t write that story himself one day.  Some strips’ focus, like issue 2’s ‘Potential’ by artist Sean Rubin and writer Alex Kain, is almost too wandering or vague to count as a legit story, but the other version of this is something like issue 3’s ‘The Critic’ by Guy Davis, which stretches the format by doing a silent strip with some pantomiming – an amusing highlight.  The ‘winner’ of the contest is in issue 4, an *ahem* pointless but well illustrated tale by Karl Kerschl (the only one with a pre-existing mouse, though – Sadie – so it makes me wonder if we’ll have this mentioned again).  I might not agree with the choice, but I’m glad Petersen didn’t back down into some “you all win” nonsense.  There’s also the touches he adds via the linking pieces – actually discussing the stories within, so these pages weren’t just concocted 100% ahead of time, and making a point to really define the space in the tavern, as each mouse will end up telling a tale and its fun to look around and identify them all.  Similarly, the covers are represented by paintings hanging in the tavern, with a small blurb on the inside of the actual comic’s cover as to what the image is depicting.

I do think Mouse Guard has earned this kind of expansion series, but perhaps Petersen could have exorcised some tighter editorial decisions to make the anthology more effective.  As it stands it’s amusing, and a welcome outlet for a lot of artists who don’t normally dabble in the anthropomorphic genre.