The Googlemeister Is In

I have been just a teensy bit obsessed with Billy DeBeck's great newspaper strip, Barney Google, lately - not so much the later Snuffy Smith-centred material, more the Early Funny Ones. Here's my one attempt to do a Billy DeBeck style, at which I think I totally failed.


The problem is that DeBeck was such a good artist - his cartooning decisions were 100% conscious and deliberate, based on a rock-solid underlying drawing ability (this is a guy who started out forging Charles Dana Gibson drawings for a living!). So his fluidity is really hard to imitate if you have a more awkward, laboured relationship with the pen and brush.

Here's an example of the real deal.


More Barney Google in print - that's what I want for Christmas.

Rhapsody in Brown

Here's a Fred the Clown strip I did for Tripwire a couple of years ago - I think enough time has passed now for me to post it here without getting anybody annoyed.

Art and Story Extreme!! had a short appearance by me last week - just a fun cameo on a call-in show, and nothing there for the ages particularly, but it was a pretty funny show once I got out of the way.

Ooh, I think that's about it. Ever so slightly behind on stuff right now (that's code for AAAARGGH) so it's a short one this week. See you in the funny pages.

Drink the Wind

Mugwhump's back on ACT-I-VATE! Go check it out here -- as before, there'll be a one-week lag before it appears here at the Hotel Fred, but appear it shall. Most exciting.


Here's something that happened a couple of days ago between me and my son Thomas -- I had a Soppy Dad moment and had to get it down on paper. It'll probably make anybody without kids cringe. Tough, I say, tough! The boy has a way with a poetic turn of phrase, what can I tell you? He'll be four next week.

Cracking Toast, Kermit!

I received some copies of Science Fiction Classics in the mail this week, which I take as a sign that it's now available. My contribution to the anthology is a Professor Challenger story called The Disintegration Machine (adapted by Rod Lott from the story by Arthur Conan Doyle). It's the first time they've attempted full colour, and right fancy it is too.

Here's a little curiosity from the vaults. Many moons ago I was asked to do a couple of sample pages for a Wallace and Gromit comic. The gig ended up going to another artist, but I was always quite pleased with the pages I came up with. So here they are. Mmm... bit of Wensleydale. Lovely.



Apart from that, my work life at the moment more or less revolves around the Muppet Show comics, which doesn't leave much room for other projects I can make exciting announcements about. I can recommend a few podcasts I listen to when I'm inking, when I need to feed some interesting content into my brain so I don't become a total vegetable: there's Art and Story, which is about the creative process as it specifically relates to comics; Big Illustration Party Time, which is more of the same but from an illustrator's point-of-view; Seqalab, the podcast of the Savannah College of Art and Design, always fun; Indie Spinner Rack, which probably needs no introduction; Webcomics Weekly, which hardly relates to what I do at all but which I find really entertaining; and a bunch of Radio 4 podcasts, including The News Quiz, Start the Week, A Point of View, The Today Programme and In Our Time. I've been meaning to plug those shows for a while now, so there we go.

Krazy, Daisy

The Small Press Expo is over and went very well, despite a few teething problems - my drawing workshop was cancelled at the last minute due to a room being double-booked - but it had a good vibe and sales were healthy. Looking forward to the next one, especially if it can be joined to the main Bristol show a bit more seamlessly. Thanks to everyone who stopped by, and thanks to Mal Smith and her colleagues for all their hard work.

There's a radio interview with me (which was conducted at the UK Web and Mini-Comix Thing a month or so back) up online now, part of Resonance FM's "Strip" feature. You can listen to it here.

This week's picture is kind of a commission, although I was paid in books rather than cash - Ulrich Merkl is one of the editors of Sunday Press's frankly wonderful Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend collection, which he sent me a copy of in exchange for a Krazy Kat drawing. I finally forced myself to stop drawing pigs in wigs for five minutes and get the thing done, so here it is. The flow is a bit wonky between panels 4 and 5, alas - I couldn't make that work and still keep the design, so the design ended up winning.

Scrape Those Barrels!

Weary after a long week, I'm at a loss for any new and exciting things to share, so I thought I'd dig up another oldie for you. This was done for the sheer joy of it, a few months after I'd seen Chris Ware's work for the first time (as if you couldn't tell). I thought maybe I'd found a way to meld my Python influences and my comics influences into some new third thing that was neither, but at the same time both at once. In hindsight it looks like what it is, a vaguely amusing page by someone who wasn't quite sure what he was doing. Still, I remain fond.


I'll be taking a short break from Mugwhump the Great in a couple of weeks - mainly because I'm burned out from overwork and I need to get things sorted out before I jump back into it. Chapter Two will conclude soon, so that will be a good place to stop for a month or two. I'm not sure what, if anything, will appear here in its place - I'd like to do something, as long as it's really easy or already lying around. I'll put me thinkin' head on.

Cow Secrets

This past week has seen me in my bed, sweating, shivering and farting, as my body finally gives up after several months of overwork. So my schedule is one hell of a mess and I'm scrambling to catch up a little right now. Quickly, then: there's a mini-interview with me at ToughPigs.com about Muppet Show related stuff...


I can't remember what the above page was done for now - although I do have a vague memory of the title being inspired by the old "Herd of Cows" crosstalk act (you know: "Herd of cows?" "Of course I've heard of cows." "No, no, a cow herd." "What did it hear?" etc. ) This was when I was still in my "let's make up a lot of disjointed panels and hope they hang together as a story" mode as a writer, which some might argue I still am. Personally, I think I've progressed to disjointed pages now.

Sorry if your Muppet Show #1 review isn't in the sidebar of the hotelfred.com front page - I was going to link to them all, but the sheer volume of the damn things got a bit out of hand. I'll probably try to work up a review links page soon, with one elegant link in the sidebar there to keep it tidy. Or I might just leave things the way they are and go back to bed, sweating, shivering and farting my way to a better tomorrow.

Oh, Yoko!

Turned in the script for my X-Men story this week. Well, I say X-Men story -- what it is is, for all intents and purposes, a roll call for the never-quite-actually-formed Legion of Substitute Mutants. All good clean fun, which is why I'm going to have to think of another character to replace Holland's mutant hero, Dykefinger.


Here's a strip written by my brother Andrew for our long-forgotten comic, Zoot!, based on a never-used idea for a film conceived by Yoko Ono, in which every character experiences time at a different speed simultaneously. This was in my "I Don't Know What I'm Doing" phase of painted colour, where I'd basically fix everything with coloured pencils after I'd botched them in watercolour. Circa 1992 I think.

I've been thinking lately that I should sort out some kind of Best of the Rest Zoot! collection, a companion volume to Zoot Suite (Zoot Brut? Zoot Cheroot?), maybe on a print-on-demand basis -- I can't see any real publisher taking a gamble on something so relentlessly anti-commercial in these troubled times. Tell you what, I'll keep you posted. Might be one for the Bristol show in May, if I can get my junk together.

End of Chapter One!

Mugwhump Chapter One concludes this week over at Act-i-Vate (and at the Hotel Fred next week). Time to panic as I try to figure out Chapter Two. I've got a plot written down but not a single word of dialogue. Watch this space as I fly by the seat of my pants, very probably into a cliff.


Here's another Kirby-themed convention booklet page, by popular demand (if two people counts as popular - as a proportion of my readership, that's probably about right, actually). I suppose it's a sequel of sorts to Kirby Planet a couple of weeks ago. These things were always auctioned for charity, so I tried to get some Marvel and DC characters in there each time to bump the bids up a bit, while still doing something identifiably Langridge. You have to pay a fee to be in the convention books these days, and the artwork doesn't go to a good cause any longer, so I've kind of stopped caring. I'll shut up now before my true age of 112 becomes even more obvious.

We all live in the future now

Weirdness Department: I was informed yesterday by Chris Reilly that Fred the Clown makes a cameo appearance in Futurama Issue #39. I haven't seen it myself, but I'm dying to.

Working on writing the third issue of the Muppet comic and pencilling the first issue and, er, that's about it. Nate Cosby at Marvel asked me to write eight pages for an upcoming Spider-Man comic, which I can just about work into my hour-and-a-half per day writing schedule if I move some stuff around. Now all I need is an idea. Eek.


For no reason at all, except for a glancing Marvel Comics connection, here's a strip I did for a convention booklet many moons ago. It's scanned from the printed page and doesn't look too pretty as a result, but I think the gags sort of stand up nonetheless. It's a page I should probably redraw one day.

Brum Brum!

My almost-three-year-old son Thomas started going to nursery recently. It's been two short weeks from screaming, sobbing abandonment trauma to essentially telling me to piss off after I take him through the door. Oh, and he's in love with a boy called Stanley, apparently.

This coming weekend I will be attending my first Birmingham International Comic Show. I'm going to try to have a new Doctor Sputnik minicomic ready, but I'm not making any promises. Sleep might take priority. Otherwise, expect more of the usual from me -- sketching, selling books and artwork, and showing off photocopies of anything vaguely recent to anyone who's interested. I'm skipping the Friday Night Launch (mainly because nobody told me there was one until after I'd booked my hotel) but I'll be there Saturday and Sunday. And, after my shameful display of hangover at the Bristol Comic Expo earlier this year, I will attempt not to vomit in front of any more children.

Currently finishing off the Time Out piece (four pages to colour today, wish me luck) and writing a six-page Captain America all-ages story set in World War Two. Interestingly, being all-ages, I'm not allowed to use the word "Nazi". I'm not sure pretending they never existed is the best approach, but it does mean my focus is less on the front lines and more on home front saboteurs and plucky girl reporters (I'm calling her Rosalind Hepburn!) and such stuff. Starting to come together, anyway. If I get my druthers I'd like to have the splendid Rob Davis on board as artist -- not sure Marvel will go for it, but I'm fighting. I'm fighting! I'm writing with him in mind.

Lastly, for no reason, here's a page from an abandoned project that will probably never see the light of day otherwise. That's what blogs are for, I guess.



Right. Birmingham!

Bring On the Quickies!

This image is from something I've been occasionally contributing to called the ISR Quickies (an outgrowth of the Indie Spinner Rack podcast forums). There have been three so far. The idea is a simple one - each cartoonist has to draw a three-panel sequence in one hour, then the next cartoonist has to follow it with another one-hour, three-panel sequence and so on until it all falls apart or comes to a hilarious conclusion. There have been three so far (#1 here, #2 here and #3 here). I've been elected to start Round 4, the result of which you see here. If you're a cartoonist and you want to sign up, there's still a day or so to get in on it...

The Redoubtable Tarquin Investigates Mysticism and the Sublime in Women's Art in Aotearoa

I'm posting this for no particular reason apart from the fact that I was looking at it recently and it made me laugh like a drain. Script by cartooning genius (and little brother) Andrew Langridge.



(Tarquin, incidentally, is based upon a real person.)

Mad Love

I've tried to get into Mad Magazine a few times. This was from an attempt I made a few years ago. It's a redrawn version of a Fred the Clown cartoon called 'Pig of My Heart". The original is better, I think, but this one isn't too shabby...

Around the World in a Daze

This was originally a seven-pager with much crappier artwork. It was done in 1988 as an excuse to do a whole lot of dreadful puns. They didn't really merit more than a page. So I've redrawn it here as a one-pager for the d'Ecco collection, and am well pleased with it.

Can You Play a Pianny?

Here's another page from the Knuckles-waiting-to-be-published pile. Cornelius' views on whether the Goon Show was anti-Semitic or not differ from my own; I always thought the dodgy "Yid" gags were mitigated somewhat by Peter Sellers being Jewish. (And the fact that they all spent quite a bit of time fighting Hitler when they were younger.) But I think it made a pretty good strip.


Four more pages to go on the new Art d'Ecco story! Then I've just got to wallop the book into some sort of coherent order and do a few splash pages...

Caution: May Contain Comedy Swearing

Aargh, dropping the ball here again. All right, here's an as-yet unpublished Knuckles cartoon. Supposed to go into a new Knuckles comic (which I'll only be contributing to occasionally, although Cornelius Stone will still be the main writer). I think it'll come out when they've got three issues in the can, whenever that is. Corn, bless 'im, has made the concession for the American market of inventing the word "gunt" to replace the more obvious choice. By George, I think we've cracked it! Fame and fortune can only be a comic book away.

Book 'im, Permhead!

Here's a strip I did years ago for a newspaper supplement pilot type thing that never took off. The character was assigned to me but the story is my own, such as it is. I think there was a dummy printed up or something but then the project ground to a halt. God knows. Anyway, here it is.



Did a page and a half again today. Aargh. Two pages, you will be mine, damn you.

Sadly-Sadly

I will cheerfully tell anybody who asks that I would love to do a Plastic Man comic. If there's a superhero strip anywhere to which I would be better suited, I can't think of it. Here are some sample pages I did a few years back in one of my periodic attempts to get DC to throw me a bone. The script is taken from a Jack Cole story, "Sadly-Sadly", and reinterpreted in my own style. Did it work? Did it arse.





Today: Starting to pencil the new 20-page lead story to the Art d'Ecco book (after finishing the Inside Soap pic I was supposed to finish yesterday). I'm going to try to pencil 2 pages today. Somehow.

Knox in Stocks

Oops! I forgot to post yesterday! The rot is already setting in...

Here's a piece I did a few years back for a New Zealand-based project called Nga Tupuna (which is Maori for "Ancestors"). The brief was to do a one-pager involving stocks and a character called Ralf the Red. Plagiarising Doctor Seuss was entirely my own terrible idea.