Hey, y’all! I’m back with another interview, this time with Tom Herpich. Herpich started off with the show way back during season one as a character designer, and eventually moved up the ranks and became a storyboard artist. This last season, he was responsible for some real gems, like: “Evergreen”, “Escape from the Citadel”, and “The Tower”. Let’s dive right in…

GunterFan: You’ve been on the show since the first season. What was your favorite episode to storyboard and why?

Tom Herpich: Probably “Walnuts & Rain”, or maybe “Evergreen”. I’d conceived and written outlines for episodes before, and done a board on my own before as well [season three’s “Thank You”], but Walnuts & Rain was the first time I’d done both on the same episode. As nice as it is working with a partner, there’s a level of spontaneity and immersion in the writing process that’s impossible to get to if you’re sharing control over the episode. So yeah, it was exciting to be firing on a couple more cylinders than usual, juggling more balls, etc. Plus I’d had that story brewing in my head for so long before working on it that I was really confident that it would “work”, which is definitely not always the case going into a new board. So that took some pressure off too. “Evergreen” was nice just for the chance to work in a more traditional swords & sorcery mode for a little bit—to draw and write some cool powerful wizards, who were a shade less silly than the average AT wizard. Also, to have to create everything from scratch makes the whole thing that much more engaging to work on. It’s sort of an irony of this job—for me anyways—that I usually want everything to be really difficult, because then it’s interesting, and therefore feels easier, whereas easy simple stuff is boring so it feels like hard work.

GF: Is there an episode that you didn’t board but would have loved to?

TH: I do remember being a little jealous that I didn’t get to work on either of the first two-parters of the series, “Mortal Folly”/“Moral Recoil” and [“Return to the Nightosphere”/“Daddy’s Little Monster”], which both felt like really big events, really big deals, and were really exciting to see come together. I remember being especially wowed by Rebecca’s Finn transformation scene at the end of “Daddy’s Little Monster”. I definitely wanted to be a part of those. Also, another example, which is maybe more of a technicality, is that I had originally pitched the idea of doing a political intrigue story in the Fire Kingdom, but that idea sorta slipped out of my hands and became “Ignition Point”. I think it was some kind of scheduling thing [that] I didn’t work on it… I don’t really remember how that happened. Anyway, I really wanted very specifically to do an AT version of Game of Thrones, which must’ve just finished its first season around then. But no dice.

GF: Where did the premise for “Evergreen” come from?

TH: That came about really slowly in little bits and pieces. The initial seed came from reading Joe Daly’s “Dungeon Quest Book Three”, which has a bunch of cool stuff in it about Atlantean alchemists. I started out with a sort of Sorcerer’s Apprentice story set in ancient Atlantis about the creation of the crown, which eventually morphed into the current story about elemental deities at the time of the dinosaurs’ extinction. Early on I envisioned it as a two-parter, or even a movie. I pictured it having two parallel interwoven stories, the Evergreen story that became the actual episode, and a present day story too, with the Ice King seemingly going really crazy, reliving more stuff from the past, and PB driving a gigantic pink tank across Ooo to shoot down the new comet. Then eventually I trimmed that stuff out and pitched it to the writers pretty much the way it is now. One thing though that changed in the writers’ room was Steve [Wolfhard] coming up with the really good idea of having Candy and Slime elementals instead of just the standard fire, ice, earth and air, which I think was a super super good idea.

GF: Who is your favorite character to write for? Who is your least?

TH: I have the most fun when I get to play around with language, and write weird abstract poetry stuff. Traditionally, Finn and Jake have been a pretty good outlet for that, but also a couple of standout opportunities were the “BMO Noire” episode, and writing for Tiffany in “Dentist”. Oh, and Lemonjon’s speech [from “All Your Fault”] was really fun too. I don’t really have a least favorite character to write… I guess maybe King of Ooo, just because I feel like Steve “knows” him better, so I’m always a little worried while I’m writing him that I’m doing it wrong.

GF: Is there any little bit or morsel you can tell us about season seven?

TH: I’m really excited about the Marceline miniseries—I couldn’t shut up about it around the office for the longest time. The stars aligned pretty nicely… everyone did really great stuff: Ako [Castuera] came back and killed it, Emily Partridge did some really nice stuff. And everyone’s heard Rebecca’s song by now I think, which is really perfectly integrated. I tear up every time I watch those scenes. Jesse in particular was in really fine form throughout the whole thing. Part 6, which he did with Ako, is one of my all time favorite boards. It’s bananas. And I’m really happy with my work on Part 8. I really drew my heart out. Hmm… what else? I did another solo board that I wrote the outline for, which I think came out pretty strong. It’s another allegorical escape story, along the lines of “Puhoy”, “Dungeon Train”, “Walnuts & Rain”, etc. I guess that’s about all I should say. The season feels pretty strong. It’s reminiscent of season 6 I guess, tonally. Maybe a touch more grounded? It’s hard to say, they’re such big things. Plus it’s not even close to finished yet.

GF: Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview!

TH: You’re welcome.

Be sure to check out:

Tom Herpich’s Tumblr: http://herpich.tumblr.com/

Tom Herpich’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomherpich

Stay tuned for more!

(Image courtesy of Tom Herpich’s old blog)