The artistry of fan favourites

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: JERROLD RUNDLE
Readers can't help but become fans of these comic book favourites.

Michigan – shaped like a mitt, home to a crashed economy and where the stellar comic books of Jeremy Bastian and David Peterson are born.

After receiving his Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking from East Michigan University, Bastian began to create the world of Cursed Pirate Girl, a story about a young girl who is separated from her father, one of the most cursed pirate captains to live. Set in the 1700’s in a Jamaican port, a comic this is not. Wrapped in an embossed hardcover and filled with over 150 torn edge – not cut – pages, the graphic novel looks like something a pirate captain would place in his own library. Bastian’s style is reminiscent of old world mapmaking, with details crammed into every millimeter of the page. From sea ghosts, to jousting swordfish, to royal cannibalism, every page, every margin, every speech bubble is a magnificent work of art in the style of a 19th-century madman.

But the Cursed Pirate Girl story wasn’t finished: more adventures and more swashbuckling needed to be put from fountain pen to coffee- stained paper. That’s correct, Bastian stains his paper before drawing the ultra detailed fish-people, cannon-embedded hermit crabs and talking storks. And so, Bastian has continued his industry-loved epic in a 52-page comic heading to comic shops like Heroes, L.A. Moods and The Comic Book Collector this June. I highly recommend this series, looking forward to further work and other universes to spilling from Bastian’s head onto the page.

Nine years ago, David Peterson began a small story about a mouse gone missing, needing to be found. Now his series Mouse Guard has spawned four sequels, custom jewellery and multiple extremely successful kick-starters – including a table top RPG, a board game, and custom mouse head from Lego minifigs. All this because of a mouse?

Mouse Guard is a story about a mouse society living in a realistic medieval style universe struggling to survive against predators, the elements and their own. The story focuses on the Mouse Guard, a matriarchally led arm – though army is a strong word – travelling through its world to multiple cities protecting its citizens.

Due to the rapid success of Mouse Guard, Peterson has been able to bring other artists into the universe with the Legend of the Guard titles. These stories revolve around an inn, where mice compete to tell the greatest story and the prize being the bar tab erased for the night. It’s these tales that often remind me why building a universe is so fun for anything can happen. The Legends series are comics about mice trying to pay for alcohol with a story.

Add Petersons level of detail to each part of his universe – he has a room full of wooden models of ships, buildings and settings which he personally built, all to get the right proportions of a specific scene – and it’s easy to see why Mouse Guard has been a favourite of comic fans for almost a decade.