Hermit Hill | #135 | 06/29/09

Suspicious Character.

Can you imagine ending up looking like one of those classic villain stereotypes? I mean, there are just certain looks that older Hollywood latched onto as being indicative of "the Bad Guy", but what if you just have an affinity for dark clothing and capes? We just jump to conclusions I guess. He looks innocent enough to me...

Hermit Hill | #134 | 06/26/09

Grateful Critters.

It's been a while since I had these guys make an appearance. Time for some cute! Are they ignorantly innocent and truly wish to show gratitude towards our hapless hero? Or are they sarcastic, nasty little monsters with a vicious mean streak? You be the judge.

Hermit Hill | #133 | 06/24/09

Say What You Mean.

I think that when robots observe humans talking this is what they hear. No wonder they get confused. I was playing around with some language translators on the web and I found the most entertaining thing to do with them is to put in a phrase, translate it to another language, then translate that back again. You'd think you would end up with the same phrase you started with, but you'd be wrong. So very, very wrong.

Hermit Hill | #132 | 06/22/09

Unzipped.

I am not entirely sure what to say about this one. I drew something similar to the third panel here in my sketchbook and just went with it. Sometime they're just for me, folks. Sometimes they're just for me.

Hermit Hill | #131 | 06/19/09

Is This Thing On?

Technology is awesome and can enrich your life. It can also really bite you in the ass. I once had a sales support guy leave a message on my phone at work and when he was done with his message I heard a "click, click" and then he kept talking to someone else on the line, unaware that he was still recording a message to me. No need to go into just what was said, but let's just say the company I was working for got quite a substantial discount on their software after I played the message for my boss.

Hermit Hill | #130 | 06/17/09

Realizations.

There is something great about the insult "douchebag". I just like the way it rolls of the tongue. The best swears just sound like swears when you use them, you know? Usually it needs to be a soft vowel that barrels into a hard consonant at the end so you can really feel it bite off in your mouth and really get some anger behind it. But with this one you get that hard consonant to start off with, a little audio punch and maybe some spit, roll into a soft vowel sound, vaguely French, and then ram right back into a nice guttural consonant you can really growl. All with two syllables for the price of one. Yes sir, that insult is a verbal thing of beauty. I encourage you to use it often.

Art School Stereotypes

As I have hinted at before in previous posts I went to art school. I spent my college years studying illustration and cartoon animation in Philadelphia. Even though I ended up working in computers as a career I have never stopped drawing and putting out cartoons and comics. I apply all the things I picked up during those days in the studio.

Today I came across a great post on Chuck Dillon's blog that really hits home and brings back memories. He's an art school teacher and has posted a series of funny character profiles of the different types of students he's had in his class. Based on my own experience I see these as being so true and accurate. I can point to each one and name several people I knew in school. Personally, I was probably a mix between the Brownoser Student and the Metal Student. Throw in some of the Stressed Student near the end of each semester and I think that was me.

Hermit Hill | 06/15/09

Pew, Pew!

Probably the main reason I never became a really big Star Trek fan was all the endless made up techno babble that populated the dialogue of every incarnation of that show. I do like Star Trek to a degree, for what it is, but man when they get started discussing some phony scientific phenomena or some engineering mechanic I really loose interest. Any episode that started off in the engineering room had me rolling my eyes.

It's something I think a lot of sci fi entertainment falls into, the need to over explain everything that's happening in irritating, nerd bating detail. Just have interesting characters and a fun story and the rest just falls into the background where it belongs. Like the original Star Wars movies. The science fiction stuff was just there. Did we need an in-depth explanation of how and why a lightsaber works? It was just there and it just worked and we could get on with the fun.

By the way, Dogstar Pirates is a reference to another comic strip drawn by a friend of mine, Greetings from Wonderland. Check it out for behind-the-scense-of-a-sci-fi-show hijinx.

Hermit Hill | #128 | 06/12/09

I Can See Clearly Now.

I am going back to the circle eye design for my characters. I tried to make the small bean eye look work, but I really feel I can get a larger range of emotions from the circle design. So, it's back to the older Walter look. Thanks for bearing with me, dear readers, while I experiment around here for a bit. It's all in an effort to make things better for you, folks. It's all about YOU.

Hermit Hill at the Dallas Comic Con

I will be running a table at the Dallas Comic Con this August 15th and 16th here in Dallas. You can find all the details of the con on the DCC web site. I'm very excited about this one because, if all goes well, I will be debuting my first trade paperback collection of Hermit Hill comic strips at this con. I'm toiling away to get the book finished in time to send it off to the printer so I can have the books in hand for the convention. I am really happy with how it's coming together. Finding time to work on the book and to keep the strips coming has been a challenge, but I've manger to remain productive so far.

If you are in the Dallas area this August please plan to come by my table and say Hi. In addition to the book I will have some Hermit Hill poster prints and Hermit Hill pins to sell, so you don't want to miss out!

Hermit Hill | #127 | 06/10/09

And then the Tree Sneezed.

There's something I find fascinating about drawing cartoon characters wearing costumes. I mean, it's just a drawing already, but to then draw another drawing on top of that and to make it clearly false so you can see the drawing underneath is just a strange thing to try and accomplish. I like trying to play with that. I've drawn cartoons where characters wear masks and big floppy animal costumes just to see if I could pull it off.

A tree costume wasn't too hard, but it's too bad the word balloons in this strip block the fact that Joe's hands are sticking out of the brand to hold the leaves in place. I couldn't get the balloons positioned in a way to show off that little detail. I need to plan my layouts ahead a little better I think.

Hermit Hill | #126 | 06/08/09

The Crazies.

Joe clearly has some problems, but Walter already has enough problems of his own to deal with. When you start seeing your own face on strange external objects you know there just isn't enough space in your life for someone else's baggage.

Hermit Hill | #125 | 06/05/09

A Desperate Plea.

That third panel reminds me of an assignment I had in character design class back in art college. We had to design our characters and then draw a scene with them totally in silhouette. The idea was to get us thinking about negative space in the design of our characters. Making the negative space as interesting and dynamic as the internal details of the character really goes a long way in conveying distinctive personality.

Hermit Hill | #124 | 06/03/09

Only the Lonely.

Joe is really eager for some company. Is he barking up the wrong tree with Walter? Only time will tell...

Bum, bum, buuuuuuuuuum! (Oh, the drama!)

Comic strip archive reformat

When I first started Hermit Hill I was drawing the strip in a full page format, typically with 9 panels. My goal with that was always moving it to print and making them comic book collections. I've put out two issues with this format and I think it worked fine.

At a certain point, however, I realized this is not a great format for reading comics on the web. A reader had to scroll to see the whole comic, which I think is bad design. You should be able to see the whole comic page at once. This was most obvious to me with the comics that played around with panel layout. The effect of those pages are lost when you have to scroll to see the bottom. So, I changed the format of Hermit Hill to a traditional comic strip format.

Since making the change I've been much happier with the strip format, but it has always bothered me that I had about 30 pages at the front of my archive with the 9 panel, full page format. I notice in my site logs that a new reader will often come to my site, click "back" a few times to see some previous strips and then jump to the first Hermit Hill page to start reading from the beginning. This always made me cringe at the thought of this new reader suddenly being confronted with that web unfriendly format.

I have spent the last couple months reformatting those comics to match the strip dimensions. For some I was able to split out the 3 rows of panels into 3 separate strips and have them each still work on their own. For others I had to drop a panel and reformat the page into two rows of 4 panels, which still worked without having to scroll. A handful of pages just couldn't be rearranged, so I've dropped them from the web archive. I will include those as print exclusive comics in the upcoming book collection.

It was tedious, time consuming work that took me a few months to find the time, but now it is complete. My full archive now matches the correct strip format and I am much happier. I no longer cringe at the thought of folks starting from the beginning of Hermit Hill. There was one drawback from doing this, the numbering of my strips had to change. I ended up with about 20 new individual strips. This is only a problem for my older blog posts that point to specific comic strips. The link to those older strips will direct to different ones. I may go back through all my blog posts to update them, but that will have to be another project for another time.

Hermit Hill | #123 | 06/01/09

Nice to Meet You, Joe.

Walter has seemed a little lonely lately, so I thought I'd throw in a new guy. It's going to take more effort than that to get Walter to warm up to you, Joe. Here's hoping you can manage to keep that cheery disposition around this grumpy hermit.