Originally conceived while Powers artist and cocreator Michael Avon Oeming was working as a late-night security guard, Mice Templar is a funny-animal medieval fantasy adventure starring mice that has been almost 10 years in the making. With the help of his frequent collaborator, writer Bryan J.L. Glass, Oeming has finally brought the series to life at Image Comics.
The first arc of Mice Templar will wrap up with a double-size issue for 5. A trade paperback collection is expected to release before San Diego Comic-Con 2008.
Despite the book’s title, the series was inspired less by the Knights Templar, a medieval European military order, and more by Oeming’s interest in mythology, particularly Celtic mythology. Oeming describes the Templar association as “mostly in name and image. At the core, Mice Templar is a mythology book, at least, for me it is.”
Although Oeming’s original idea for Mice Templar began in 1998 with a short story posted to his Web site, it wasn’t until he encountered Glass at a writing workshop in 2003 that he realized he’d found the right “voice” for the book. In subsequent years, the two creators struggled to find time for the series, despite Oeming’s busy schedule as a writer and artist for Marvel Comics and Dynamite Entertainment. “I just had to learn to be patient and wait for Mike's decks to clear,” said Glass. “The benefit in the end was that it gave me years to refine the tale into a supremely satisfying finished product.”
Glass, who cites Watership Down, The Lord of the Rings and the Bible as his primary influences for the book, said that he has worked hard to maintain a sense of mythology throughout the series. “Mythology possesses the power over cultures that it does because it is passed along in the form of stories. Even the New Testament's parables of Jesus and Aesop's Fables are told in the form of stories intended to convey a moral.”
For the Mice Templar story, that moral is “doing the hard thing in the face of adversity,” said Oeming. Although this entails some strong action elements that may not be appropriate for some younger children, Glass is quick to say, “It is not just about violence for the sake of violence, but to heighten the impact of the heroism, the sacrifices that must often be made.”
Responding to the inevitable comparisons between Mice Templar and Mouse Guard, David Petersen’s acclaimed medieval fantasy comic from Archaia Studios Press (Villard is publishing the trade paperback in March 2008) that also happens to feature swashbuckling mice, both creators insist that while the two books share a genre, as many superhero books do, they differ widely in their execution. Glass adds, “David [Petersen], Mike [Oeming] and I have assumed that we will inevitably share our audience, and the ultimate winners are going to be the fans who love the anthropomorphic high-fantasy genre.”
Glass also said that he and Oeming are also open to the possibility of a long-running commitment to the Mice Templar series—if fans support it. “The prospect of producing a hundred or more issues of Mice Templar is not difficult to imagine,” said Glass. “The world we've developed is so rich that a pair of creative guys could cultivate that field for the rest of their professional lives if given that opportunity.”
