Jewish Women in Pop Culture #3: Rhoda Morgenstern

I love Rhoda. Although I wonder how many Hereville readers will know who she is without having to click on the link?

Interview, interview, interview!

There are three (!) new interviews with me available online:

* On the Blog of the Association of Jewish Libraries

* On Graphic Novel Reporter

* And on The Portland Examiner (part one of a three-part interview!)

Goodness! Thanks to all three interviewers for talking to me.

Video of me drawing Mirka

Here’s a video I made of me drawing Mirka. I’m not very happy with how the drawing came out, to tell the truth, but the video might still be fun to watch. The video is speeded up to ten times the actual speed I drew at.

And part two:

Hereville reviewed on “Attempts”

I’m a fan of Stephen Frug’s blog “Attempts,” so I was delighted that he wrote an in-depth review of Hereville (and relieved that he liked it!). Here’s a sample:

In both his page layouts and lettering, the largest influence on Deutsch’s work appears to be Dave Sim’s Cerebus. I checked, and he admits as much in his post on the completion of Cerebus, but honestly I think I would have seen it anyway: the lettering and page-layout in Hereville is simply and unmistakably very Simmesque. But since Sim is a quite extraordinary cartoonist, one of the best to work in the medium (if also possibly the craziest and most misogynistic), this is by no means a bad thing: indeed, a fair amount of Hereville‘s stylishness and formal inventiveness can be traced to a thoughtful absorption of Sim’s lessons. (Plus, y’know, it’s shorter, and feminist rather than misogynistic.) Deutsch learned from Sim, but the work is his own, and is very well done.

Another influence, I think, is manga: he uses a lot of manga-esque motion lines and the like to convey action. — And actually, I’m guessing here — or perhaps only showing my own limited cultural frame — but I suspect that another influence was Scott McCloud: Deutsch’s use of motion lines, of what McCloud would call aspect-to-aspect transitions, and the like, strike me as ones that betray the influence not only of the sort of comics McCloud talks about but McCloud’s own specific analysis as well.

Stephen is right about the Dave Sim influence on my cartooning — I think I might now be the third most Sim-influenced cartoonist in print, after Troy Little and Alex Robinson. (I’m not counting Martin Wagner since he seems to have retired from comics, at least temporarily.) He’s also right about Scott McCloud’s influence on my work. Although I’ve read and liked some manga, I think the manga influence mainly comes through McCloud’s work (as Stephen suggests).

The other major influence on my cartooning (that I’m conscious of, anyhow) is Will Eisner’s work, especially his graphic novels in the 80s and 90s.

There’s much more, so go read the whole thing.

Horn Book reviews Hereville: “Unique, laugh-out-loud funny, and thoroughly engrossing.”

From Horn Book Magazine:

Eleven-year-old Mirka Herschberg is not your average dragon-slaying heroine. For starters, she’s a Hasidic Jew. Then there are the crazy quarrels with her stepmother, Fruma, who defends one side of an argument, then, in a heartbeat, switches to the other. Case in point: “You want to slaughter innocent dragons? How could you?” quickly morphs into “Mirka! You mean you’d let a dragon devour me and the whole town? How could you?” With her ankle-length skirt and long-sleeved shirt, Mirka certainly doesn’t look like she’s ready to take on a fire-breathing monster.

And that’s a large part of this graphic novel’s charm: the very traditional versus the super fantastical. It’s a contrast that Deutsch plays with in both his story line and his illustrations. His Shabbat-observing protagonist (who first appeared in a shorter webcomic) soon finds herself up against a talking pig who vows: “I will rip the chupa at your wedding! I will take your firstborn child! I will knock over the casket at your funeral!” The source of all this porcine fury? Mirka stole a single grape from the pig’s garden. After besting this very non-Jewish foe, she’s in for another adventure. What’s involved? A troll, a knitting contest, and a sword fit for a dragonslayer.

Deutsch’s graphic novel is unique, laugh-out-loud funny, and thoroughly engrossing. Sequel, please!

—Tanya Auger, Horn Book Magazine

Information about purchasing Hereville can be found here.

Barry Interviewed By Publisher’s Weekly!

Publisher’s Weekly just posted a medium-length interview with me about Hereville. Here’s a sample:

PWCW: Mirka is a very convincing character, especially in her moments of reflection and self-doubt. How were you able to get into the head of an 11-year-old Hasidic girl?

BD: Well, research helps, of course. I’ve read a lot of nonfiction about life in Hasidic communities, the most helpful of which was Stephanie Levine’s Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers. I also read novels written by women who had grown up in Orthodox communities, like Naomi Ragen. I read a lot of websites written by Orthodox Jews, especially websites by girls or women. But the most important thing to know is that people are people. Male writers who worry about “how women think,” as if women are a different species from men, make things needlessly hard. Research is important, but in the end, Mirka’s a person, I’m a person, and so we have a lot in common for me to draw on when I’m writing Mirka.

PWCW: Another thing that struck me was how well the characters deal with the gender roles of a traditional society. They don’t totally conform, but they aren’t all rebels, either. How were you, as an outsider, able to gain insight into that?

BD: Research! There’s a lot of information out there about gender roles in Hasidic communities, if you look for it. My own politics are pretty feminist, and as a kid I was lousy at fulfilling the “boy” gender role. So it’s natural that I’m drawn to a character like Mirka, a girl rebelling against her community’s gender expectations. That’s material I’m always comfortable writing.

But I also wanted to be fair in how I present the setting, and the truth is that most girls in a community like Mirka’s fit in better than Mirka does, and are happy to do so. I wanted to show that in the comic. So we have Rochel, who—to my mind—is one of those people with a talent for happiness, and is mostly comfortable with what the world expects from her. And we have Gittel, who is a more prickly person, and has well-founded worries about her future—but who is sincerely dedicated to her role as a girl, and really wants most of all to be a good mother someday.

My thanks to Brigid Alverson, the interviewer, who did a great job. There’s lots more, so go over there to read the whole thing!

Preview: Page 107, before and after

Here’s a preview page from “Hereville.” These preview pages can have spoilers, so don’t look if you’d rather not see!

This time I’m showing one of the pages that got redrawn between the first version of Hereville, and the graphic novel. I show both versions, so you can see how they compare.

(Info on buying Hereville is here.)

Page 107 from the graphic novel:

Compare that to page 27 from the earlier, self-published “Hereville”:

Mostly just a new inking and coloring job, plus I did a fair amount of redrawing heads and faces in minor ways. But I also made a big change, replacing four panels from the original with one larger, rewritten panel.

Why the change? First of all, the way the cut panels were written felt a little “out of character” for Mirka — that kind of over-the-top sarcasm doesn’t seem like her. Having her yell like Lucy yelling at Linus seemed much better.

Secondly, to me having lots of long narrow panels on a page indicates tension. But having that many long narrow panels on this page struck me as going over-the-top with the tension for this point in the scene, and didn’t leave much room for building up to more tension later on in this scene. Cutting down from 9 to 6 panels “relaxes” this page a lot, to my eye. (So did getting rid of the not-very-meaningful trailing of Mirka to the edge of the page in the bottom row of panels).

Plus, I love the “pushing Zindel with the word balloon” effect (something I swiped from Dave Sim’s comic book Cerebus, although many other cartoonists have done it — most famously Charles Schulz in Peanuts). The new panel is one of my favorite panels in the entire book.

Barry is interviewed on Graphic Novel Reporter

I was interviewed by John Hogan for Graphic Novel Reporter. Check it out here.

Thanks, John!

Preview: Page 72

Here’s a preview page from “Hereville.” These preview pages can have spoilers, so don’t look if you’d rather not see!

(Info on buying Hereville is here.)

Continue Reading…

Barry Will Be At APE This Weekend

I’ll be appearing at APE this weekend, with lots of copies of the Hereville graphic novel to sell! If you’re in San Francisco, please come by and say hi. I’ll be at table #652, along with Jonathan Dalton.