Page 12 of Hereville is up. It’s in black-and-white for now, because my access to computers is limited.
As several of you have noticed, this page is more than a little late. I was blocked. Being blocked is a strange and disquieting thing. At first you think you’re just being lazy. But, eventually, I noticed that what I do when I’m blocked is a heck of a lot less fun than just drawing a new Hereville page would be. It’s just – whatever it is that lets me know how to lay out that next panel, or how to draw a figure so it has some life in it – it just isn’t there.
It’s not fun, and it’s not just being lazy. And it’s something I hope to avoid in the future – but that’s what’s frightening, that being blocked or not feels so beyond my control.
In any case, I’m over it now. The timing isn’t great – at first I was over it in a period when I was working non-stop at my day job, now I’m over it and thousands of miles away from my drawing board – but I’ll take what I can get. Look for a new Hereville page next Thursday, and (I hope) every Thursday after that.
UPDATE: Color art is now online.
It looks terrific, even in b&w.
I like the debate and don’t mind the black and white; it’ll look cool in color, but the story’s alive again. Glad you unblocked.
For some reason, I really, really like the line “What am I, professor at the University of Troll Fighting?”
Maybe it’s because Amp is one of the few people I’ve encountered who actually could hold such a position….
Okay, great punchline, BUT…
Was the need for something like a punchline what was getting you blocked? I write opinion columns, and I am often blocked at the begining, thinking of the first paragraph. After the first paragraph, things flow. Sometimes it is a difficult slog, but thats all on “technical” matters – I already know whare I am going, so I am not really “blocked”.
So when I first read your post, it seemed odd – You were claerly smack dab in the middle of a story, so how could you be blocked? didn’t you know where the story was going?
After reading it, I see that you drew a self-contained scene with a puchline, albeit one that advances the story. So I am guessing that your being blocked was not compareable to my being blocked not in the middle of a column, but at the begining.
Is this correct? Are you trying to make each page a separate scene that can be enjoyed on its own, but that adds up to a story? Or is it as I originally approached it, where each page is integrately connected to the overall story, so that taking each separately would be no different than trying to take page 8 separately from a 20 page comic book?
very nice, Amp.
it has a comic rhythm to it that I don’t think I’ve seen in hereville so far.
the first few, establishing character were clever, but not so much ha ha funny I didn’t think.
the new few were dramatic, and then that last one was just plain creepy.
to be honest, my first impression of the witch put her more as the enigmatic riddle talking yoda-esque thing, so “professor at the University of troll fighting” caught me off guard, but it’s certainly not inexplicable. it worked out nicely.
I’m glad you waited to work on it rather than just pushing something through. it turned out for the better.
To be honest, I think that the comic actually looks better in black and white.
About being blocked . . . I’ve always found it hard to explain to non-artists what being blocked really feels like. it often gets dismissed as being laziness or over-perfection, but it’s something more difficult than that. I’ve always felt that it was like being suddenly fogetting a language or being struck dumb. There is a need to express something, but the ability to articulate that expression has been taken away—your mouth makes shapes but only gibberish or silence emerges.
There’s been a lot of ink spilled over the idea of what being blocked is and how to overcome it. Some people suggest that there’s no such thing while others suggest that one should just “work through” the block, flailing away at that work of art until the ideas return. My personal experience suggests that blocking does happen and that “working through it” is only an effective way to make me mad. I’m convinced that there isn’t a universal solvent to disintegrate creative blocks, but I wish you luck in finding whatever works for you even if that thing is a tincture of time.
All of this is to say that I’m happy to see that you’re back at work on the comic. I hope that things are easier for you in the future.
You know what? I love the black and white!
I like the eyebrows too.
I like the aerial view in the first panel lots and lots.
Once I was blocked designing makeup for a play–these characters were flames (that walked and talked), and I was making them all orangey but it wasn’t working. I remember I was thinking about it and became incredibly tired, so I took a nap–and dreamt of blue-and-orange flames. I tried the blue-and-orange it at rehearsal that night, and it was fabulous.
Ever since then, I’ve thought that blockage has to do with not giving the subconscious room to breathe.
Thanks to everyone for their comments.
Decnavda, the script is written ahead of time (although I keep on editing it while I draw) – what I was blocked about was the drawing.
And the story is intended to be read as a whole, so I don’t worry too much about making individual pages stand-alone units. But when it’s not inconvenient to make the page end on a good “end of page” note, I usually do it.
So, when will the “University of Troll-Fighting” shirt be available in the Alas Shoppe?
If the narrative structure is coherent enough (which obviously is the case), the illusion of an obligatory punchline per page disappears onc you read the story as a whole (when I reread Derek Kirk Kim’s completed Same Difference, I couldn’t remember where each installment ended, although I always had the feeling of a punchline when I was following it panel by panel for almost two years).
Sorry about the block. I find blocks to mean that the door to the universal source of creativity hasn’t turned enough yet to match with your open door. The two doors keep turning and sometimes they get out of sync. But then my creativity is not very high level, consisting largely of trying to find a nasty way of saying something, so it may be a good thing for the doors to close often.
Just found while browsing the MT site: Barry Deutsch interviewed by Jen Manley Lee in the Modern Tales Family Newsletter.
Jenn. Sorry.