I’m thrilled to announce that Friends of Lulu has nominated Hereville for two awards! “The Lulu Awards recognizes the the people and projects that helped to open eyes and minds to the amazing comic and cartooning work by and/or about women.”
Hereville was nominated for the Leah Adezio Award For Best Kid-Friendly Work, and Mirka was nominated for Best Female Character.
To vote for Hereville (or for the other nominees — swell folks, all of them!), go to Friends of Lulu and follow the directions there.
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Hey, speaking of Hereville, whatever happened to it? I’m still working on it, believe it or not. Comics are slow!
The graphic novel will be coming out from Abrams in late 2010 (in time for Hanukkah!). I’m just finishing up the second draft of the pencils now, and I’ll begin work on the final art in a bit over a week.
Meanwhile, just to whet people’s appetites, here’s a penciled page from chapter one:
I think there should be a long, blonde braid trailing from one of the upper windows.
Awesome, and yet completely deserved. Kudos.
Congrats! I be looking for that releas in 2010.
Mirka is a worthy nomination for BFC, but I’m a bit puzzled about the Adezio nomination. Hereville will attract younger readers – any story about a child in cartoon format will. But only a mature reader will really appreciate the storytelling.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. It just seems a strange category to nominate it for.
Edit: On second thoughts, the nomination is for best kid-friendly work, not most-kid-friendly work. Perhaps “kid-friendly” is a threshold criterion rather than a comparator. Is Hereville kid-friendly? Yes or No? If so, is it the best one?
Is it really kid-friendly? I agree that kids will like it. On the other hand, it does rather exemplify this trope.
Most good kids’ lit explores Family Unfriendly Aesops, and the one Hereville hits — that sometimes it’s okay to disobey your parents — is key in coming-of-age stories, in that they all are about separation and growing up. (The Family Friendly Aesop in Hereville — that the things adults do that annoy you may turn out to be pretty dang useful — is outstanding.)
At any rate, the nominations were well earned. And I’m looking forward to the 2010 release.
I agree that there are some family-friendly Aesops in Hereville, including the “outstanding” one you mention. “Bad decisions have bad consequences” is another one. Also the witch’s condemnation of Mirka’s actions supplies a lot of family-friendly Aesops. What’s notable is what the witch does not condemn.
The family-unfriendly Aesops I get from Hereville are:
1. A small child can effectively use violence to fend off multiple (human) adult attackers.
2. It’s OK to commit armed robbery to get what you want. (Not condemned by the witch!)
3. A fine way to win an argument is to threaten to kill your opponent if they don’t agree. (Also not condemned.)
4. You can only fulfil your dreams by doing a lot of bad things, and the prize isn’t worth it anyway.
5. You can morally condemn someone for the bad things they did, even if you instigated everything.
Edited to add: 6. It’s OK to pay your debts with stolen property.
And just to be clear, I am not criticising Hereville. Tropes Are Not Bad, not even Family Unfriendly Aesops. Tropes are tools, and Ampersand is a master craftsman.
I merely query Hereville’s characterisation as “kid-friendly”.
I think it’s a great comic and I hope you win.
I’m really enjoying the turn the discussion here has taken. :-)
For me, “How Mirka Got A Sword” is a story about ambition and the pursuit of ambition. And in my opinion, the pursuit of ambition is often amoral.
As a parent, the best kid-friendly works are those the parents and the kids can enjoy, even if it’s sometimes on different levels. Hereville definitely works that way. My kid doesn’t get everything in it, but he really enjoys it. And I enjoy reading it to him, moreso than some books he likes.
As for the family-unfriendly morals, have you checked out any Brothers Grimm fairy tales recently?
And congratulations. It’s well deserved, and I’m looking forward to the long version.
As for the family-unfriendly morals, have you checked out any Brothers Grimm fairy tales recently?
My husband finds The Lion King incredibly exasperating because he thinks that starting with The Little Mermaid, Disney was increasingly changing classic fairy tales to make them more PC, and then when they came up with their own story, they wrote it about the divine right of kings (when the right guy — as determined by bloodline — is on the throne, it rains!).
The Incredibles is kind of fucked up, even though there’s a lot I like in it, because the good guys are the ones born with inherent superiority and the bad guy is the one who uses his smarts and talent to achieve the same powers.
When I went to see “Ponyo,” I first thought “gee, what great messages – it’s OK to be a terrible driver with your kid in the car, leaving a 5-year-old at home alone during a horrendous storm is a fine idea…”
But then I concluded that if media for children was solely based on positive choices, you’d basically have a bunch of really dull stories about children obeying their parents, who carefully supervised them at all times to ensure their well-being. To have an interesting story that centers on children, you sort of have to get the parents out of the way somehow. :)
Surely Syndrome’s smarts were his superpower.
I’ve been thinking about a number of observations about Hereville that came up in the open thread.
Firstly, there is fact that, when Mirka first asks Fruma, how to kill the troll, Grandfather overhears, and asks what a troll is. Fruma responds that it is a “Goisch monster”. Ampersand translates “Goisch” as “Gentile”, which I took to refer to non-Jewish human culture, but chingona argues that the word simply means “not Jewish”. In other words, Fruma is saying that trolls are, in chingona’s words, “not our stuff”, i.e., nothing to do with them. It’s as though she were shutting down the discussion. (See also her body language in the frame where she says this.) She begins to ask Mirka how she heard, but then stops and changes the subject. Its almost as though she catches herself, i.e., stops herself from keeping the topic alive.
This contrasts with her willingness just one page later to talk about the subject at length and in detail to Mirka again asking, but not pursuing, where Mirka heard the word. It’s almost as though she was willing to talk about the troll to Mirka, but not in front of Grandfather, or perhaps not in front of the other children.
I’m not suggesting that Fruma intended for Mirka to go after the troll, only that she knew about it, and that she was laying down the groundwork so as to be able tell her properly about it when she was older.
My second observation is that, the above speculations notwithstanding, there’s nothing in the narrative to indicate that the troll has been actively preying upon the Aherville community, or even that it preys on anyone other than those who try to rob it. Grandfather has never even heard of one. Nevertheless, the word of God is that the troll is:
Perhaps Ampersand just meant that it preyed on Mirka, or that it preys upon some other community of Jews (though there’s nothing in the narrative at all to suggest this.) But there’s another possibility that occurs to me. Perhaps the troll is going to prey on the Aherville community out of revenge.
Oh Mirka, what have you done!
I have to say, Daran, I very much disagree with you that authorial comments are, er, authoritative.
I think of it in terms of canonical and not canonical. What’s actually in the comic is canonical (or maybe not — see below). What an author says outside the work might be interesting to readers, because it shows how the author thinks, and because there’s a chance it will find its way into a future story and thus become canon — but until that happens, it’s not canon.
If I ever have a choice between making a story what I want it to be, and staying consistent with what I’ve said in comments online, I’ll definitely go with the story.
It’s also interesting to hear you discuss this particular scene, because that scene is a little different from what’s in the graphic novel version (which, of course, you haven’t had the opportunity to read yet). The tone of the asking-about-the-troll scene in the graphic novel is slightly different; I’ll be interested in seeing if you think the differences matter (if y0u someday read the GN version).
Which is what I meant when I said the comic isn’t quite canonical anymore. Once the GN comes out, where it and the comic differ, I’m going to think of the GN as canon.
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Speaking only for myself, I think that Chinoga’s interpretation of what Fruma meant by saying the troll was goisch is absolutely right (and I think maybe everyone agrees on that).
Without saying one way or the other what Fruma knows, I think this is really sharp, and interesting.
Since I’ve not seen the GN, I can only comment on the web comic.
I said:
That is possibly not correct. The only thing that was established was that he didn’t know the word “troll”, which was indicated to be a English word. He might be familiar with another word for it.
Thank you. It is a testament to the depth of characterisation in your work, that we can have sharp and interesting conversations about it. One could never speculate about the motivations of Tom and Jerry in this way.
The overarching assumption is that the characters have consistent personalities within the normal human range, that they have motivations concordant with their personalities, and that their actions are consistent with their motivations. So if we see something which appears to be inconsistent, we assume that there is an in-story explanation for it, even if, out-story, the only reason for it is that it was necessary to move the story along. (For example, the out-story explanation for the exchange between Fruma and Grandfather seems to be that Zindel needed to hear that the troll was “Goisch” in order to strengthen his motivation to oppose Mirka’s enterprise.)
I say that Fruma probably didn’t intend for Mirka to go after the troll, because that is the most parsimonious view. It would violate the above assumptions for Fruma not to care about Mirka’s safety. Alternatively it would require additional in-story elements for her to have reason not to be concerned about Mirka’s safety. Parsimony is a principle of ratiocination, not of Drama. So it’s not unreasonable to speculate about what those additional in-story elements could be. Perhaps Fruma knows of a prophesy concerning Mirka and the Troll.
My current pet theory is that the whole thing was a set-up between Fruma and the Witch to give Mirka a safe outlet for her adventurous inclinations. Fruma knitted the troll. The Witch animated it. Fruma’s claim that a “troll” is a “Goisch monster” was Jedi Truth. She was only defining the word, after all, not commenting upon any particular troll she might know about.
No I don’t really believe that.