Nate Bramble - The Cartoonist

I am Nate Bramble, the creator of Hermit Hill. I currently live in Dallas, Texas, USA with my beautiful wife, adorable son and our dog, Max. I'm a 30 something software engineer by day and an avid student of cartooning by night.

My college years were spent at the Art Institute of Philadelphia where I studied cartoon animation. After a few years working for a small touch screen, tavern style game company I worked freelance as a web designer. I then moved into software and software testing as a career, but never gave up scribbling in my sketchbook.

I've been self publishing comic books, participating in cartoonist anthologies and writing and drawing comic strips for the web for several years now and I enjoy every minute of it.

My personal taste in cartooning lean towards older, more classical styles of pen and ink. I love the black and white strips of the 40's and 50's the most. Krazy Kat, Mutt and Jeff, classic Pogo, and older Peanuts strips are my personal favorites. Artists like R. Crumb, Shannon Wheeler, Charles Addams, Daniel Clowes and Joe Sacco are also a huge source of inspiration to me. The idea that a single hand, a pen and a sheet of paper can combine to create a whole world is the all encompassing fascination I have with the art form of cartooning!

Hermit Hill the Comic Strip - In A Nutshell

This comic features the wild adventures of a lonely hill and it's equally lonely inhabitant, Walter. While it is intended to be a remote getaway, life does tend to encroach even where it isn't wanted. Poor old Walter tries, in vein, to keep the world at bay by hiding atop his earthy tower.

This is a comic strip created, written and illustrated by indie cartoonist Nate Bramble. It was started in the Summer of 2008 and was published directly to the web three times a week (Mon., Wed. & Fri.) for two years and went on hiatus in 2010. Book collections of the comic strip were self published and are available for purchase through the Hermit Hill web site.

The Hermit Hill strips are created using a combination of traditional cartooning techniques and modern, digital tools. The illustration portion of the strip is drawn using pen and ink on strips of bristol board. All the characters, backgrounds and actions are drawn by hand. The illustration is then scanned into a computer where the borders, dialog text and word balloons are added digitally. Once the strip file is complete a high resolution version is saved for future printing and a lower resolution version is published directly to the Hermit Hill web site.

Walter Gregorian - Star of the Show

He is the "hermit" of Hermit Hill. Walter is an older gentleman who has a lot of gripes about this over populated world. He's retired after a long and somewhat notorious career as a theater critic. One night, while at a show premiere he was attending for the purposes of writing a review, he became painfully aware that everyone around him was watching his every move, waiting to see how he'd react to the show. Walter suffered a mild panic attack and had to leave early. From there his anxiety about being out in public only intensified. Embittered and frustrated, Walter retired and tried to disappear.

Walter bought a piece of land far away from any big city, just outside a small suburban town, in order to get away from... well, everything. He built a small house high on a hill and tries to live out his days in peace and solitude.

His intense agoraphobia doesn't allow him to leave his property and manifests itself in strange, sometimes hallucinatory ways. Perhaps he tries so hard to keep people away out of shame and embarrassment for his condition. Or maybe he's just a complete grump. Either way, he'd very much prefer to just be completely alone. Of course, in this modern world, that may not ever be possible.