If the title captures the essence of the location (although no more than that: it is wonderfully evoked, with a real life breathed into the somewhat out-of-time setting), then the sub-title equally pithily captures the book's plot: How Mirka Got Her Sword is the tale of just that, how a heroine came by the sword that she will (presumably) use in future adventures. This is a village which is, to its residents, simply 'here'. So the setting of the town, it's feel, is very well captured by it's title: 'Hereville'. (There are lightbulbs, but no cars, no computers, no phones the language spoken is called Yiddish (although the text itself is in English with only occasional Yiddish or Hebrew phrases.)) It's set in a remote village, one that is the entire world for its characters: no mention or thought is given to the outside world, save for the fact that one of Mirka's half-siblings seems to have been raised there (and, thus, unlike her siblings, knows what a pig looks like).* Everyone in the town is Orthodox Jewish (Hasidic, I think) at one point two of Mirka's sisters are shocked at the notion that the witch they've encountered might not be Jewish. Hereville is set, apparently, in the contemporary U.S., but aside from a few oddities such as electric lightbulbs, you'd never notice it: I think even a careful reader could go through the entire work imagining it in a small village in some unspecified Eastern European past. Hereville is, I think, a book that's well served by it's three-tiered title, so I'm going to follow that to introduce it. So you should sprinkle this review with the salt of possible bias, to taste.īut for what it's worth, in my view, Hereville is a delight. All of which is to say that I was predisposed to be biased in Deutsch's favor, knowing him to be a thoughtful and interesting blogger and (in an internet-acquaintance fashion) a nice guy. Deutsch even cross-posted one of my blog posts at Alas, which was nice of him (since his is a real blog with actual, y'know, traffic). Eventually I realized that the fabulous little drawings on the blog were his and even eventuallier I realized he drew other things, too. In fact, I was a reader of Deutsch's Alas, a blog (where he posts as ' Ampersand' or, informally, 'Amp'), before I realized that he was a cartoonist or interested in comics - only to discover that he was not only a comics reader but a comics creator, which was a nice surprise.

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword is the first published graphic novel by Barry Deutsch, a political cartoonist and blogger that I've followed for a number of years.

Hereville how mirka got her sword