In part two of this interview, Hereville creator Barry Deutsch talked about his character's Hasidic background and her place in that society. Now he discusses his art process, and Mirka's future.
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Christian Lipski: Some of your depictions are striking in their realism, like Mirka’s stepmother’s hands when she’s knitting. Do you draw from a model or just wing it?
Barry Deutsch: It depends on the panel, but any panel depicting realistic hands knitting I use photo reference. I got my friend to knit for me, and I took about 300 pictures of her hands from every angle. And you can’t just trace the photo, so I have to change them so that they look like Fruma’s hands or Mirka’s hands. On more difficult poses I will take photos of my friends contorting themselves to whatever the pose is.
CL: You have very tolerant friends!
BD: Do you know Dylan Meconis?
CL: I do, I’ve interviewed her for Examiner.com.
BD: She’s my primary Mirka model.
CL: It’s probably fun to be in someone else’s comic at some level.
BD: In the scene where Mirka is bullying Zindel and twisting his arm behind his back, Jenn Lee and Dylan posed for that. In that one, Dylan played Zindel, and she’s flexible, so Jenn was really able to twist her arm. We said, “Dylan, is this OK? It looks like it hurts,” and she’s like “Oh, no, this is fine!”
The problem with using photo reference is that you have to “defeat” the photo. Wherever I use photo reference, I’ve usually tried several times to get the panel to come out right without it. You don’t want to look like you’ve traced the photo, and the best way to do that is to not use a photo in the first place. But if you do use a photo, you then have to work at the drawing until it no longer looks like a photo. You’ll do the initial underdrawing of the pose with the photo, then turn the photo off and develop the pencils. Then, because I pencilled the entire thing and went back and inked the entire thing, when I inked, I modified the drawing again and by that time it had been many months since I’d seen the photo.
CL: So you’re creating some distance between the source material and what you eventually create.
I’ve heard that you already have some sequels lined up. Is that true?
BD: Yes, Abrams has asked me to do two more Hereville books, and I’m currently working on the second one.
CL: Do you have a title yet?
BD: I had one that I’d mentioned in other interviews, but the story has moved on in leaps and bounds in a completely different direction and now the original title is moot, and I don’t have a new title yet. “How Mirka Found a Title.”
CL: [laughs] That’s a quest. Are you going to be appearing at other bookstores other than Powell’s on November 4th?
BD: On November 12th, I will be at Mockingbird Books in Seattle, and I will also be at the Miami Book Fair, November 15-17.
CL: Miami Florida is a good place to be in mid-November. You were recently at APE (Alternative Press Expo) in San Francisco - how did that go for you?
BD: Well, I sold about fifty books, which considering my location was way out in the hinterlands, I thought was pretty darn good. It was fun! It was nice to be physically holding the book in my hands, and to be able to talk to people about the book. The people I talked to were real enthusiastic, it was well-received. That’s definitely the good part of cons, I get to talk about my book over and over again, and cons are really a good place for that.
CL: You looked like you were having a good time. Do you have a schedule for the Hereville sequel?
BD: I want to turn in the completed artwork for the sequel a year from now, which is a scary thought. Long days for me between now and then.
CL: About the same number of pages?
BD: Thereabouts. We’re shooting for something between 120 and 140.
CL: Does the remastered graphic novel keep the same color palette as the webcomic?
BD: It’s similar in that it’s a limited palette, but the particular colors are different.
CL: The troll has a line, “It’s definitely NOT an unfinished end,” which Mirka disagrees with. Is she reflecting the continuing story of Hereville?
BD: Well, I didn’t want the story to end on a cliffhanger, because it’s more satisfying for the reader, but mostly because I didn’t know if there’d be a second book. There certainly is more to tell of Mirka’s story. I have many more Mirka graphic novels in my head, shuffling around and waiting on line. She’s going to get a bit older with each graphic novel. We will eventually get to see Mirka the grownup, although not in these next two books.
CL: She’s eventually going to have to deal with romance at one point, like it or not.
BD: “You have no choice, you must romance!” [laughs] Although it’s not her going through it, I will say that in the second book one of her older sisters is going through the courtship process.
CL: That’s another good reason to have older girls in the family, so that you can show that happening without having your protagonist go through it.
BD: Definitely. And in Hereville, the girls tend to get married when they’re around 18 or 19, so Mirka’s far too young for that, obviously.
CL: Good, because she’s got plenty of other things to do.
BD: [laughs]
CL: Well, thanks a lot. I really appreciate you taking the time.
BD: Thanks, I appreciate *you* taking the time.
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Hereville is available from Amazon, and also through the author's website, where you can have your copy inscribed. Deutsch will be premiering Hereville on Thursday Nov 4 at Powell's on Hawthorne, including a slideshow presented by the author.
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