Roger Langridge's Blog, page 237

Fred the Clown: Book Review

At this point my panicked inability to get to grips with the four-panel format is showing, because this is a reworked script by my brother Andrew, originally featuring Art d'Ecco's idiot sidekick, The Gump. Not the last time Andrew will come to the rescue.

Fred the Clown: Date with a Bearded Lady

This one pops up in one of the print issues at the bottom of a letters page, but it's not in the collection, so it gets an outing here.

Cliffypoo

The Penguin

X-Muppets

Batman

Let's have no more of this Frank Miller nonsense. Dick Sprang is your man, and let's say no more about it.

Fred the Clown: An Object Sold

The main thing I remember about this one was the format change. I experimented with this four-panel arrangement for a few weeks before reverting to my half-page strip format, for reasons which now escape me – probably because I hoped it would be easier to maintain a weekly schedule, which it turned out not to be. Paring everything down to four panels actually turned out to be more difficult. Who'da thunk?

Fred the Clown: Just A Couple of Dummies

I think this was my first foray into the criminally-underexploited "Ventriloquist-Dummy-As-Cartoon-Character" genre, of which (off the top of my head) I seem to be the only practitioner. This particular strip was a bit of a damp squib, but it laid the seeds for one of my favourite Fred stories, Dummies, as well as a Mugwhump the Great story, The Show Must Go On. So – a necessary stepping stone, I suppose.

Fred the Clown: Fred of the Antarctic

Here's another one of the Fred strips I redrew for Tripwire. Again, it's one I liked a lot at the time but which needed to be redrawn because of the original landscape format, so it missed the cut when I was printing Fred the Clown as a comic book because of time constraints. Glad I finally got around to it, though.

A Minor Detail

Here's a detail from a job I did recently for the Guardian. (I think it'll be printed next month...?)