Roger Langridge's Blog, page 241

Rocky and Bullwinkle: Unused Cover Concept

This rough was submitted for consideration for #2 of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but one of the other ones got the eventual nod.

Fred the Clown: Lonesome Cowboy Fred

This one's on the list of strips I'd like to redraw at some point for use in a portrait-format book. I still like it, and I think the only reason it didn't make it into the print comic was because of the need to redraw it and the time I had available. Other "Cowboy Fred" strips would eventually follow.

Fred the Clown: Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit

This one's pretty simple but I still like it.

Fred the Clown: Kodak Moments

This is an early, not-quite-successful attempt to tell a big story in a few panels by allowing the reader to infer a lot of the stuff in between shots. I return to this idea a few times over the years. (The best example is "The Interesting Thursday," which we'll get to eventually).

Some Other Characters

These are for the same thing as the other thing.

Work In Progress

Some character sketches for a thing.

More Moose, More Squirrel

This is from the same, pre-model sheet batch of roughs as the previous post. The nearest thing to a guideline I had was "just show the Moose and the Squirrel looking cool." Well, okay.

Moose and Squirrel

So I'm doing these Rocky and Bullwinkle comics for IDW with Mark Evanier, whose scripts have been a delight thus far, and as a part of that I've been pitching ideas for covers. So I thought I'd run a few of the rejects here. Here's the first...


This one was before I'd been sent any model sheets or anything, so of course all the characters are a bit off... although if you look at Rocky and Bullwinkle's sundry comic iterations over the years, there's really a lot of variation in the different artists' interpretations (which is all to the good, in my opinion; a little bit of a cartoonist's personality injected into a licensed property never made anything look worse).  

Fred the Clown: Action, Diction

The main thing I remember about this one is that I had decided to draw my originals smaller in order not to lose all the detail I usually drew back then – I did like my crosshatching back in the '90s. (Still do, really.) So this was an experiment to see what something drawn very small (A5, or about half-letter size) looked like on screen. Came out all right, visually at least.

Fred the Clown: Random Acts of Violence

This is the first strip I did when I decided to do a weekly "Web Fred" back in 1999. I was colouring like a kid with the wrong crayons in a bit of free software that came with my first scanner, and the idea wasn't up to much – I still hadn't quite figured out who Fred was, I think. Best to get this one out of the way.