Mouse Guard is a different sort of book. It tells a different sort of story. The Mouse Guard are on a mission, they must find the grain buyer/seller who went upon a journey between Mouse homes, who was lost. The Mice live in communities and live with a certain humble sort of grace, being small, being aware of all the worries and threats. The Mouse Guard follows the warriors who search. This book does not work as normal books do. This is not exactly a comic book in the sense of sequential art and writing in joint effort to tell a story. This is instead more of a visual novel, the text is not extraneous, it is just used differently. The text is more like a narrator’s voice telling the reader important details. I am not, in the least, saying this is not a good work due to it being different. I am saying that if you have an open mind, you will see that this work is one of immense beauty and quality. I am deeply impressed here.
THE LONE AND LEVEL SANDS
By A. David Lewis, mpMann, & Jennifer Rodgers
YOWZER. If MOUSE GUARD is high art, what would you call a work that retells the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, from the perspective of the Pharaoh Ramses? (By the way, the title pharaoh comes from per-aä, which literally means the great house, that is, the royal family. The Pharaoh is the head of the royal house, so he is the house.) The way in which this story is told, is not to completely destroy all previous versions of the story, but instead, through using the Pharaoh as the touch point for the reader, to Synthesize the various versions found in various religious documents, legends, and oral histories. This is a work that does not fail in its premise or delivery. There is value with reexamining the world we believe in through the eyes of an outsider. There is value in considering the whole, from the perspective of distant observer, a historian’s goal. But are the questions asked about human agency in God’s decisions and affairs done well and without an iron fisted way of asking? I’d say less successfully. Ultimately, whenever a high concept work is presented to the reader it becomes judged on having enormous goals, how it achieves or fails in achieving its goals, and lastly the product apart from the high concept. I refuse to judge how well this work achieves its goals, because frankly, it is good and interesting upon its own terms. As such, I think this book is valuable, interesting, and well done.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849
Edgar Allan Poe was a writer, poet, editor and critic. He was also someone who lived a life that was as tragic if not macabre as his poems and short stories. He invented or inspired new genres of American writing, Crime Fiction, Science Fiction, Horror Fiction... Amongst the best remembered of his work are: The Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The City In The Sea, The Black Cat and The Raven.
His life saw great troubles, and his efforts to live as a creative talent were filled with death, sadness and poverty. When he died at age 40 he had suffered loss of family, wife, success and hope. That he was a talent is of no arguable state, he was. That the horrors of his life came through in his literature, while perhaps more of a question, seems almost as certain. Writers like HP Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury and more found Poe to have opened doors and made a way for fiction that was different than had been available previously.
“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'” Edgar Allan Poe
Add A Comment to this article
Email the Author of this article
