Petersen released a collected hardcover in July 2013, collecting all six issues as Chapters One through Six, the 2010 Free Comic Book Day one-shot Spring 1153 as a prologue, a short epilogue, a twenty-two page section of maps, guide pages, and cutaways, and a gallery of the aforementioned pin-ups. As with Fall 1152 and Winter 1152, each issue was accompanied by a pin-up by a guest contributor(s): Alex Sheikman, Sean Rubin, Duncan Fegredo, Charles Paul Wilson III, Shane-Michael Vidaurri and Mike Mignola & Dave Stewart. The final issue was released in January 2013. Issues 2 and 3 followed in April and September 2011, respectively, and Issues 4 and 5 in January and August 2012, respectively. Īrchaia published Issue 1 in October 2010. īy early 2010, Petersen had completed the cover for the first issue, and he finished outlining this issue in April that year. This longer character arc necessitated six issues of material.
However, when developing the outline for the series he found that Celenawe's history could be better told as a "quest" narrative.
Petersen originally planned to make this a shorter, four-issue anthology series with each issue documenting a different Celanawe adventure. Part of my goal was to pre-explain how Rand, as a mouse who mainly ever carries a shield, functioned with a Saxon and a Kenzie.Around 2007, when Petersen was beginning to draft Winter 1152, he committed to the idea that the third Mouse Guard volume would explore the history of Celanawe and of his finding of the Black Axe. Beyond personalities I added a few visual cues: Omaira's tied sash-belt echoes the tied knot of Saxon's cloak, Lynea's hood is ment to remind you of Kenzie's hood in Winter and the long ribbons in front are to symbolize Kenzie's longer slender frame as well as the verticality of his staff, and Celandine's scale armor is symbolic of Rand's shied both in function and shape. The three sisters are obviously analogs for Kenzie, Saxon, and Rand. So I stuck it away in my back pocket until the time was right. I shared the idea with Mark Smylie over breakfast at the Baltimore convention that year, and we both agreed that while fun, seemed too much like a light hearted children's tale compared to the tone at end of the Fall book. The idea of having three young sibling mice take over the role of the Black Axe was something I'd come up with back when writing the end of Fall 1152. And while it's never appeared on a map, I have a suspicion if I ever draw a much older map of the territories, you may find it listed there. I studied Nate's pages to try and be consistent with the visual depiction of the location. The location of Nettledown, is from Nate Pride's Legends of the Guard story "The Ballad of Nettledown". Orren as the 4th wielder of the Axe was covered (in pictogram) in The Black Axe book, but the story of his death and children are new for this story. The acorns were chosen as the other symbol because I'd already drawn the cover with the characters standing on a pile of acorns and didn't have a way to visually explain it beyond that it looked cool.Īs the tale within a tale begins, the readers are introduced to some Black Axe lore. I've got all my notes for how a complete set of them work (with their own versions and counts of suits and numbers) The cards we see for the story are 3 axes (each with a different Haven Guild founder 'suit' and a pair of acorns. In my blogpost about the cover, I described the visual influence for these cards. In past years, I used a few objects as lead-ins for the stories: stained glass, marionettes, and storybook style illustrations. At the start of the story we see that as a child he and his father (and mother too) lived in Shorestone, a city I featured in Black Axe and is a building trade craftmouse den as well as having secret ties to the mythic Black Axe itself. So, this story gave me the opportunity to introduce readers to him a bit more. He hasn't been a major player in Fall or Winter, but he will be in the upcoming (and as-of-yet unscheduled) Weasel War of 1149. As I said at the top of the post, this story is a tale told to Rand.