The Austin Comic Creator With A Mouse-eye Apocalypse View

While living in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, Mac Smith saw a glimpse of the apocalypse. He was working as a caricature artist when the storm slammed into the Gulf Coast in 2005. The devastation was almost biblical. As Smith’s apartment flooded, when he wasn’t thinking about survival, he was thinking about, of all things, mice.

“I just moved into this place, and the landlady neglected to tell me that it was absolutely infested with mice,” Smith said in a phone interview. “I thought I had to get rid of them, but there [were] a lot of them. When the apartment flooded, I always wonder what happened to those mice. I like to imagine them going on adventures.”

They do now, thanks to Smith. He is wrapping up a wildly successful Kickstarter and production for Tails of the Wasteland: River Rat Blues, the latest entry in his Scurry universe, a dystopian world full of anthropomorphic animals living through humanity’s last nuclear war that first launched in 2016. Like a lot of Texas comic book creators, Smith has found crowdfunding to be a way to build a dedicated, loyal following of readers for stories outside the mainstream. He intentionally stayed away from big publishers because he wanted to retain the rights to his creation. Kickstarter allowed him to forge his own path starting in 2016. When it came time to publish an omnibus, he struck a deal with Image that has left him at the driver’s seat. 

Scurry is an ingenious new take on the apocalyptic fiction genre, a sort of Watership Down meets The Walking Dead. Following an atomic war that wipes out humanity, animals re-inherit the world. However, the house mice have long since learned to live on their own. Scurry follows a colony that is rapidly running out of food to scavenge, leading to infighting between those who want to leave for a nearby city and those who want to stay in hopes the humans will return.

The plot vaguely mirrors the classic Don Bluth film, The Secret of NIMH, and that’s not a coincidence. Smith grew up watching dark 1980s fantasy movies, and NIMH’s tale of a rat society living in the shadow of man in particular was a major influence on him.

“They were family friendly, but also kind of traumatizing,” he said of the genre.  “And that kind of always kind of stuck with me.” 

Born in Mississippi, the 47-year-old taught himself to draw after falling in love with comic books with no access to formal art training. That independent and adventurous spirit has served him well as he crisscrosses the U.S. working mostly as a concept artist for video game companies like Blizzard for his day job.

The genius of the series is how real and raw it feels despite it being about anthropomorphic mice. There is bigotry, greed, stupidity. It will feel instantly relevant to anyone living through tough times.

There is a sense of the cosmic about Scurry sometimes. Wolves are more than the new apex predator now that humanity is gone; they are archons of a newer, wilder world that the timid house mice can barely conceive of. Much of the first volume is dedicated to how survivors lose their humanity (metaphorically speaking) as danger and starvation crowd in.

Yet, it’s also very hopeful. Smith’s main protagonist, Wix, is a joy to follow. A resourceful mouse whose primary strength is his ability to sense danger, he guides his colonies through betrayal and invasion while going on what basically amounts to a spiritual quest for the heart of the nearby forest. Basically, he is the Odysseus of mice, and he makes a journey of a few miles seem like an interstellar epic.

Scurry has been a grand success for Smith. Audiences are responding enthusiastically to judge by River Rat Blues. His recent Kickstarter campaign was funded over 700 percent over his $10,000 goal. The first volume publishes in August. He’s eyeing 2027 for the second volume. 

“These mice, they don't really have any natural defenses or anything other than running a lot, but you know, even a small creature like a mouse can survive these huge terrifying events,” said Smith. “There's always hope.” 

At heart, Smith is still someone looking at the end of the world and seeing the power of people to come together and survive it.