The Hereville Book Premiere event will take place at The Spritely Bean, located at 5829 SE Powell, Portland, Oregon, beginning at 6pm. Past Hereville books have been nominated for Eisner, Ignatz, Harvey, and Andre Norton Awards, and have won the Sydney Taylor Book Prize, the Oregon Book Award, and a Sybel Award.

This consistently clever and thoughtful series hasn’t lost a particle of momentum.” –Kirkus Reviews Backgrounder Wallace and colorist Richmond augment Deutsch’s busy panels, providing a pleasingly earth-toned setting for Mirka’s latest adventure. “Deutsch has created a wonderfully inventive world, in which fantastic creatures believably reside alongside a religious community Mirka is a delightfully flawed heroine that nearly anyone can relate to and enjoy. The festivities will continue pretty much until people stop showing up. There will also be a presentation at 7pm, featuring live drawing demonstrations, an animated film of the Hereville drawing process, and other fun stuff. Hereville creator Barry Deutsch will be on hand at 6pm on November 13th at The Spritely Bean, Portland’s comics and coffee cafe, to sign and sketch in books, alongside his collaborators, longtime Hereville colorist Jake Richmond, and new background artist Adrian Wallace. Hereville: How Mirka Caught A Fish is the long-awaited third book in Barry Deutsch’s Hereville series, about “Yet Another 11-Year-Old Time-Traveling Orthodox Jewish Babysitter.” And it’s finally here! In the first Hereville book, there are some drawings that still make me wince because they look so obviously drawn from photos. I think I’ve gotten much better at not letting source photos beat up my drawings. The biggest change was Mirka’s entire figure, and turning Layele’s head so that readers could see her happy expression. Even with the photo, there are still differences between the reference and the final image – although there are also bits that are very similar (compare Fruma’s hands to Matt’s). So I made my housemates Matt, Maddox and Sydney pose for for this photo (Matt is the girls’ dad), and used that as the basis for my drawing.

This three-way hug is definitely one such pose. When I use a photo ref and the resulting drawing looks like it was photo-referenced, I think of that as me “getting beat up by the photo.” But some poses are just too hard to figure out without reference. I usually don’t use photo reference for figures – it’s difficult to prevent photo-referenced figures from looking lifeless, at least for me (other cartoonists do it better). (It’s from page 128, if you have the book and would like to compare.) Here’s my part of a panel from Hereville 3.

Hereville how mirka got her sword