Somewhere in the vicinity of early 2013, I’d been scanning some of the bookshelves in our local library, near the children’s section, as my kids were 12 and 9 at the time. That’s where they kept all the graphic novels, which I had recently discovered that I enjoyed reading and looking at. I had thought I didn’t like graphic novels because I didn’t get into mainstream superhero type stuff, but it turns out that I still like the format for stories that are more compelling to me.
Among many pretty cool titles in the graphic novel section were Mouse Guard: Fall 1152 and Mouse Guard: Winter 1152, which I immediately checked out and devoured. I’d been drawn to the style of the adorable illustrations, the small world of the small creatures, and the universal struggles contained within the stories. I later nabbed what other Mouse Guard content that I could at Free Comic Book Day events and sought out the other published stories. Mouse Guard: The Black Axe is probably my favorite of the books, but all of them are so good, and the art is some of my favorite anywhere. The world of Mouse Guard is so rich, however, and there are so many characters, that there remained so many stories untold. But there is one story for which we have to wait no longer: the origin story of the Black Axe.
Coming out today, January 20, 2026, is Mouse Guard: Dawn of the Black Axe, the origin story of the Black Axe, both as a weapon to wield, and as a wielder of said weapon. Written by David Petersen and illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez, this book is a worthy successor (and antecedent) to the existing Mouse Guard content. The writing and pacing of this book continue to have the same feel and be just as compelling as the earlier published ones. I read Dawn of the Black Axe last month, immediately following re-reads of Fall 1152, Winter 1152, and The Black Axe, and it flowed from one to another really well.
Note: If you need to do some catching up on Mouse Guard characters, stories, or other content, check out David’s newly updated—as of the end of 2025—and very helpful index on his website.
I recently had the opportunity to interview David Petersen in advance of the release date of Dawn of the Black Axe and asked him a slew of questions about the Mouse Guard series, his process, and the new content.
1. For someone new to the series, do you recommend reading the books in the order in which they were published, or in chronological order? Or some other order?
Somehow, according to fans, I’ve managed to write a series that can be read in any order. I didn’t intend this, and I’m not sure I fully believe it, but over the twenty years of talking to fans (fifteen years that there have been multiple hardcovers) I’ve been told that fans read them out of publication order and had no problem going backwards or skipping around. I think I write the books so they build off of one another and are best read as published (Fall, Winter, Black Axe, etc.—with Legends of the Guard and the short stories falling between those books somewhere), but I certainly won’t argue with anyone who’s enjoying my books in the order they prefer. It’s true that the in-world chronological order would have started with Black Axe (third in publication), but now with Dawn of the Black Axe taking place before that, I suppose the latest release is a place to start for new fans as well.
2. Where have you drawn inspiration from for the characters, settings, and plot lines?
The setting is a blend of my love of talking animal stories, the natural world, and fantasy adventures. I think my time in the Boy Scouts informed a lot about the Mouse Guard. The landscape all is set in my home state of Michigan, both because of the bio/climate diversity and because I have handy visual reference by just living here. My parents took me to several living museums (Gettysburg, Greenfield Village, Colonial Michilimackinac, etc.), and seeing reenactors use historically appropriate equipment in period clothing to do everything from mill wood to make wheels to weave cloth certainly made an impact on building the world of how I think about and draw the mice doing all of those things at mouse-scale.
Friends and family are the jumping off point for many of the characters. Kenzie, one of the main characters, is based on my best friend Jesse Glenn who I met when I was 11 in Boy Scouts, and his calm, methodical demeanor is very much the counter point to some of my worse traits that I poured into his mouse patrol companion Saxon; so that relationship was one I knew well. The mice are all certainly playing into archetypes and exaggerations (or perhaps simplifications) of close friends I roleplayed with as a kid, or family I’ve known my whole life or that I met as an adult through my wife.
Plotlines are usually inspired by ideas mashed together of three things. One: what I want to tell the audience (like the first book was not just an adventure story, but also needed to help define both what the Mouse Guard is and is not by example). Two: twists on tropes from other stories or movies (or the monomyth Joseph Campbell explains in his work). And three: what is the logical next step or consequence for the characters in-world from whatever moment(s) they are coming out of. I’ve also done homages to Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale,” Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf,” as well as putting my experience with end-of-life care for my Mom into a tale.
3. What’s your story writing process?
That has certainly changed over the years. My earliest process was to not write any dialogue or much in the way of page by page instructions for myself on what to draw, but rather it was just an outline of bullet points of what happens in each issue. I’d put tick marks next to each of those to denote about how many pages I thought I should take to show that part of the tale. As long as the tick marks matched the page count, I could just draw as I went making those decisions in sketches and on the pages, and adding all the text and dialogue at the very end where I thought they were needed.
As the books went on, I definitely did more and more writing beforehand, planning out the dialogue especially so I knew I had enough room for it all as well as panels in the right spots for the characters saying it. I still start with that bullet point outline, but I expand it into a full dialogue script with notes about action when writing for myself.
For Dawn of the Black Axe, because I was writing for someone else for the first time, I had to provide a lot more to the artist Gabriel Rodriguez. I was self-aware of giving him all the info he needed about what I intended for the visuals or pacing or mood, while also giving him enough room to be an artist and not have me describe the finished panel art but rather the intention of the page, actions of the characters, and descriptions of the settings.
4. I know you’ve shared a lot of your illustration process on your blog and elsewhere. Do you have a favorite example?
I suppose one of the better ones to show the full process is the Mouse Guard 20th Anniversary Print. It’s a good example because it has all the regular pencils/inks/colors process but also has photo reference/inspiration and a physical model I built for reference. That post also shows that things don’t always go according to plan and that I ended up redrawing a character entirely and mirroring the composition before starting the inking process. But, any of the posts of my cover work or pinups will break down my process consistently.
5. What do you hope readers take away from these stories? What themes do you hope readers latch onto?
Everyone knows what it’s like to feel small—these stories are about the smallest of smalls in a very big world where nearly everything is a threat, and yet, it’s not a dystopia, it’s not hopeless grim-dark… it’s enthusiastic about altruism, working together, helping the most in need, and using every resource of bravery and wisdom combined to make life not only better for yourself but your species.
For Dawn of the Black Axe, I wanted to be sure that our hero is not a hero due to an exceptional background or already being great––he’s not the most likely candidate, and his peers worry about his sanity. He wants to take short cuts and give up multiple times, but what makes him a hero is caring about others and putting one paw in front of the other even when against all odds or all seems hopeless.
6. Which of your characters speak to you the most?
Usually, I say that, because Saxon is based on some of my most unflattering traits, I empathize with him the most because his struggles are my struggles. But, it’s Celanawe (the mouse who we first meet as the true Black Axe) who I can’t seem to shake. I created the character to be my Obi-Wan Kenobi mouse—a mentor character who is still impressive at a senior age with a history of being legendary long before that. He appears in the first book, the second has a major theme of mentor/mentee that he’s a part of, and then the third book is a prequel all about him. I thought I was done with the character, but he popped up in my mind as I was starting work on the eventual fourth book (The Weasel War of 1149). I thought he might appear as an Easter egg rather than a cameo, but he’s already included more than that. Not sure when or if I’ll ever get to it, but I also have outlined a whole story about his years with the Black Axe that wasn’t covered in the material I mentioned already… I dunno why, but I can’t seem to quit him. Perhaps it’s the Black Axe itself I can’t ignore.
7. There’s a lot of death in the stories, and a fair amount of violence in the new one. What do you hope readers, including children, get out of that aspect? Do you have different age recommendations for the different books? Do you recommend families read the books together?
I always love the idea of reading books together—at any age! We recommend about 8 and up as a reading age for Mouse Guard books (especially if you read them in publishing order), but any reading age number is an arbitrary estimation since all kids are different with what they can handle emotionally. With the heavier topics like violence and death, I try to never trivialize them or do them just for their own sake—I give all of that weight and meaning. Everyone is going to go through conflict and loss at some point in life; I think letting kids practice their emotional journeys when it’s in the pages of fiction is the responsible thing to do rather than shield them from it until they must unfortunately face it in real life -or- expose them to it irresponsibly with gratuitous examples of it.
And as you mentioned, parents or adults taking an active role in reading helps for there to be guardrails, to say it’s ok to put the book down for a few months, or to have a chat about the questions or feelings—even if that just means letting the young reader know they are available as soon as a moment on the page hits them in a way they need to come talk about.
8. Some time has passed since the last book was published. What’s it been like moving another book through the publishing process?
It has been a while since the last book in the main series, but I’ve been putting out Mouse Guard short stories or anthologies since then and also had to navigate all the changes in the publishing world while keeping the existing books in print, so I was prepared with getting Dawn of the Black Axe through that process. My publisher Boom! was great about working with me, like the other Mouse Guard books, so that the entire book design (even as the individual comic issues were coming out) were what I wanted and met the same branding aesthetics. They were great about working with artist Gabriel Rodriguez, since this is the first Mouse Guard story that wasn’t a short tale in an anthology with another artist drawing. I was just glad to hear from so many fans and comic shops that were thrilled to see a new Mouse Guard book coming out again.
9. You’ve always included art from other artists in the Mouse Guard world (profiled here). What has the experience been like to have an entire book be drawn by someone else? How did you decide whom to choose? What works of Gabriel Rodriguez‘s do you find yourself going back to, time and time again?
The plan for this book (and more of them if there’s enough of a market for these stories about past axe wielders) is to have a guest artist draw a story of one of the past wielders of the Black Axe. As you mentioned, Legends of the Guard was a preparation for handing over the art duties to someone else, but in those cases the stories were all tall tales of legends, not canon material––so if something didn’t fit with how I would do it in the main series, there was a built-in explanation for it being an in-world fairy tale. For Dawn of the Black Axe, I was writing it as an official story and I wanted an artist I could trust to get that right. I’ve known Gabe for years. He’s a master draftsman and genius storyteller. I know his work most from Locke & Key (a series I really love). That series was a collaboration with him and writer Joe Hill. Knowing Gabe’s work, us having toyed around with ideas to work on something together, and his long-standing collaboration made him my only choice for Dawn of the Black Axe. In fact, we postponed starting the project for at least a year until his schedule was clear for it.
10. I liked how the illustrations in Dawn of the Black Axe had enough in common with your own art style so as to not be jarring, to be a smooth transition if you’re reading the books in published order, and yet also be its own thing. How much collaboration was there between the two of you during the book’s creation?
Gabe and I certainly share some artistic sensibilities about details and texture and well as line weight and making locations feel believable. It was one of the reasons I wanted to work with him. I also knew there would be fans worried that I wasn’t doing the art on this one, and I knew that Gabe’s work was enough of a kindred spirit it shouldn’t be too jarring to anyone.
It was Gabe who insisted that I should color the book, so he pushed for that part of the collaboration that I wasn’t expecting (I’d planned that we’d hire one of the colorists he’d worked with before). Before any pages were drawn, Gabe was very generous in working with me to be sure my scripts were what he needed and not problematic for space on the page. As a first-time writer-for-someone-else, I didn’t know if my scripts were giving him too much or not enough, so we had a healthy chat where I let him know to speak up if anything was a red flag or simply didn’t work. I provided Gabe with all the Mouse Guard books and even some sketches and things I had behind the scenes that were relevant to this story, but I then assumed I was done until inked pages came in to color, but Gabe asked if I’d draw at least one diagram/reference (if not a more detailed idea) of each location we visit in the book. I did some doodles, and blocked in some digital color on them, and sometimes provided photos (some of my own or gleaned from the internet) of landscapes or real locations to be inspired by. As his penciled pages came, I think I only gave him two artistic notes in the whole book. One was more of a story beat thing he thought would be visually interesting (it was more interesting than what I had) but it wouldn’t have worked with what happens later in the story. Beyond that, I stood out of the way to let him do the genius work that led me to want him on the book. I tried to write towards his strengths, so it would be wrong for me to obstruct his path by being overbearing.
11. The Mouse Guard books are filled with great quotes and wisdom, including the famous, “It matters not what we fight, but what we fight for.” One of my favorites is from Winter 1152: “Collect all of what you can while along a life’s route: Lessons, friends, mentors, loves and truths worthy of pursuit. They offer no guarantee to be there still if missed once before.” Is there advice or other specific quotes from the books that you keep coming back to personally?
“A mouse who offers no care for those most in need around them is a wretched thing,” and, “Because you do not understand a creature doesn’t mean they haven’t anything important to say,” are two from recent short stories that stick with me. The main quote you mention (that has become synonymous with Mouse Guard) is, “it matters not what you fight but what you fight for”—I slowly realized to stand up against all odds for what you know is right can easily be warped and interpreted as “the ends justify the means,” which I have Celanawe point out in the Winter book as the frightening and dangerous flaw of mottoes and slogans.
12. Here’s a more selfish question. Em’s backstory—will it ever be shared? I’d love to learn more about her, her work and notebook, and her bird affinity. I think she’s my favorite character.
I love it! Can’t say that I have any plans to do more with Em, but you’re right, there’s certainly fertile story ground for her younger life befriending birds, her brother Benn, tracking down history and lore, her ties with the Haven Guild, and how cozy her apple-tree apartment life is with the loom and natural history specimens she has there. I guess never say never.
13. What’s next for the world of Mouse Guard?
I’m slowly working on the next Mouse Guard book called The Weasel War of 1149. It’ll be the longest of my books (each issue/chapter being 36 pages instead of the usual 23). I’m not far enough along with the pages that we can schedule a release date yet, but I hope to make enough progress on it in 2026 that I won’t overstretch my fans’ patience too much longer.
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Catch up with the Mouse Guard universe by re-reading as much earlier content you can get your hands on, and then check out the brand new Mouse Guard: Dawn of the Black Axe, out today! It’s a worthy addition to the world of Mouse Guard. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
