In a very quiet week for new releases, the biggest new book is probably Mike Oeming's Mice Templar. 

Oeming has been tinkering with this concept for the better part of a decade - something he's rather keen to stress, perhaps because Mouse Guard has come along in the meantime.  Now, in collaboration with writer Bryan Glass, he's finally launched it as a bi-monthly series through Image.  Interviews suggest it's planned for a 25-issue run, although the book itself isn't too clear.

It's a generously proportioned book, as well - fifty pages of story, full colour, no adverts, for four dollars.  That's pretty good value when you consider that Marvel and DC will happily charge you three dollars for a story of less than half the length, interspersed with adverts.

Set in one of those indeterminate quasi-medieval "long ago" periods that you so often find in fantasy stories, Mice Templar is a story set in a village of anthropomorphic mice, occasionally plagued by raiding parties from rats and such like.  Years ago there used to be an order of Mice Templar, but they've faded away into legend.  The lead character, Karic, is a young mouse obsessed with the Templar legend, even though the older mice see to think this is likely to cause trouble.  Naturally enough, there's a prophecy involved somewhere along the line.

It's basically a straight fantasy story which happens to have been done with mice.  And that means I'm probably not the ideal audience, because fantasy has never really been my thing.  This isn't a book to convert me to the genre, but it's a classy enough package that the fantasy readers should find it worth a look.  There's a lot of slow-burn world-building going on, which is usually key to the appeal of these things.  Oeming seems to be experimenting with a jagged, angular style that reminds me somewhat of Mike Mignola, and it's certainly striking.

Nonetheless, even allowing for the fact that it's not my genre, there are enough problems with this book to make me think it's one for the fantasy devotees .  The characters aren't altogether easy to tell apart - frankly, one anthropomorphic mouse looks very much like another.  And the plot is fairly conventional, once you look past the fact that they're mice.

Which brings me to the oddest feature of the book - I can't quite figure out why they're mice at all.  This isn't a funny-animal book, which is fair enough.  But nor does it really do anything with the mice that you couldn't do with human villagers.  There's nothing very... well, mousey about them. 

There's a little playing with scale.  The trees are huge.  The local spider doubles as an evil monster for knights to slay - although this fudges the dimensions wildly, because judging by the relative sizes, either the mice are tiny or the spider is two feet high.    But even this is still fairly superficial.  The characters come across as standard fantasy-world humans who happen to be drawn as mice.  Is it meant to be symbolic?  Is there something in a future issue that clearly calls for mice?  Perhaps, but at this stage it comes across as gimmicky.

Now, as a straight fantasy story, Mice Templar is basically fine.  Fans of the genre will probably enjoy it.  But it doesn't really follow through on the full potential of using anthropomorphic characters, and ultimately the story seems to be a fairly standard genre piece that happens to feature mice.

Rating: B

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