Roger Langridge's Blog, page 275

Nice to be back...

So I'm visiting my family in New Zealand at the moment.

The Fez!

So! I've got a three-page story in the online comic, Aces Weekly, to which David Lloyd kindly invited me to contribute. It's a new character called The Fez - sort of a Victorian Doctor Strange, only sillier. Here are a few of the character drawings I did while I was coming up with the feller. The Fez appears in 

The Ghost Who Walks

The Phantom has had a regular Australian comic book title since my dad was a boy, originally consisting of strip reprints, but throwing in some new stuff as well, I believe. The character is more famous down-under than Superman and Batman put together (well, maybe not since all the movies, but for a long time that was true). I'll be visiting New Zealand for a couple of weeks by the time you read this (this post is scheduled in advance, don'tcha know!) and will do some research for you and find out if they're still as ubiquitous as they once were. I will report my findings.

Juuudge!

I did this for somebody, sometime, at some convention or other. They must have been good enough to send me a snap of it or something, because here it is in a folder full of 'em. Thank you, anonymous kind person.

Vigil of the Mad

Here's a little oddity I did for some X-Men Halloween thing a couple of years ago. The brief was to do something inspired by a famous horror movie - not being much of a horror fan, I was stuck for an idea until Nate Cosby, the editor, suggested doing a riff on Village of the Damned. I can't remember why I threw in the Edward Gorey pastiche but I'm glad I did.

Mickey Waits

William Hartnell was an Oompa Loompa

'Strue.

Sinister Pigs

They're evil, I tell you.

The Thirteenth Ceiling

Okay, so apparently there was a problem with the settings in my Pulley account which blocked anyone outside the UK from buying The Thirteenth Floor. I'm assured this has been fixed now, so please try again, and thank you for bearing with me while I try to figure this stuff out.

I thought I'd share a couple of cover roughs I played around with on my way to the final cover. I couldn't make up my mind between them, until my friend and sometimes-collaborator Scott Gray applied his editorial eye to it and pointed out that covers with human beings on them are generally more engaging. Well done, that man - he was right.

I still kind of prefer the rough version to the finished version.

The Thirteenth Floor

(UPDATE: I've just been informed that there's a problem delivering to the United States - no idea why. I'm looking into it. My apologies if you've been thwarted in your ordering attempts - I hope to have this resolved shortly.)

So... in the late 1990s I did a graphic novel. (I say novel; it was 70 pages plus change. A big comic, really... but then, aren't they all?) For various reasons, but mainly because it didn't quite work as a story, it's been sitting in a drawer since then.

But digital publication wasn't an option back then the way it is now, and what I'd feel odd about printing and selling for the full retail price of a book, I feel okay about charging £3 (that's around $5 for the Americans, I think) for and offering as a download. So here it is: The Thirteenth Floor, folly and curiosity.

There are a couple of options: you can buy the PDF here, or the CBZ format here. Both the same price, both roughly 40MB. (There was going to be a third option of a ZIP file containing a couple of other formats as well - epub, mobi - but I don't appear to have enough space on the Pulley account I set up last night, so they'll have to wait. If you buy any format and you'd like one of those, though, just e-mail me and I'll fix you up.)