Roger Langridge has been working in comics for over 20 years, producing some of the most consistently funny material in a zany, over-the-top style. Aside from his own creations which have been published by the likes of Fantagraphics, Deadline and Dark Horse, he has written and drawn the definitive comics take on The Muppet Show for Boom! as well as some alternative takes on established superheroes for Marvel, DC and 2000 A.D. Last year’s Thor: The Mighty Avenger for Marvel was one of the most critically-acclaimed mainstream comics of recent years. Next week sees the launch of his latest project for Boom!, a Lewis Carroll-inspired comedy called Snarked. I spoke to Roger over email about this latest project and his comedy influences.
-- Gavin Lees
All art by Roger Langridge unless otherwise noted
Can you tell us a little bit about the concept behind Snarked?
It’s basically a long-form story, a quest, though broken up into issue-length chunks that can stand on their own to some extent. The basic idea is that the Red King, ruler of the unnamed little kingdom where our story starts, has gone missing on a sea voyage — his eight-year-old daughter, Scarlett, becomes the new Red Queen and resolves to find her dad, whom she is convinced is alive and well and out there somewhere. She’s aided and abetted in this by the unscrupulous Walrus and Carpenter, who, through a series of improbable circumstances, she appoints as her Royal Protectors. And so they set off for Snark Island to rescue the King — encountering lots of misadventures along the way.
What attracted you to re-interpret Carroll’s work?
I’m a lifelong fan of Carroll; I’ve read the Alice books many, many times, and I always get something fresh out of them each time I do. So there was that. There was also a sense that, in order to sell a brand-new concept to an audience after I’d just come off working on The Muppet Show Comic Book and Thor the Mighty Avenger, I’d need to come up with something with at least a whiff of familiarity, a smidgen of traction in the wider culture, rather than something entirely created from whole cloth. I’d been dabbling with a couple of Carroll-related ideas anyway (a web strip featuring the Walrus and the Carpenter, who I thought would make a fun, vaudeville-style double act; and a direct adaptation of The Hunting of the Snark, which I backed away from once I became aware that Mahendra Singh had just done one), and thought it might be productive to try and mash the two ideas together and see what happened, And here we are!
Your style of cartooning is quite exaggerated, and over-the-top — which was a perfect synergy in The Muppet Show — do you feel, though, that what the Carroll characters gain in visual style from you (opposed to Tenniel’s matter-of-fact style), there is something lost in the subtlety of his humour?
Yes, probably. I’m sure the kind of humour I’m going for isn’t at all the same kind that Carroll was going for. But I’m not interested in being the second Lewis Carroll or John Tenniel, I want to be the first Roger Langridge, so I think that’s a perfectly valid approach — Carroll has been subjected to so many reinterpretations by such a wide variety of artists over the last 150-odd years that my efforts are only a tiny drop in that ocean in any case; I may as well make it as much my own as possible.
I ask this because I thought that one of the great things about Zoot was that it highlighted the inherent comedy in the Beckett/Kafka/Sartre brand of existential writing. Do you think of those writers as humorists?
I’m not familiar enough with Sartre to comment, but the other two, yes, very much so. Apparently Beckett once said that his ideal Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot would have been Laurel and Hardy. I can totally see that.
I love that idea! I can see that thread in your work as well — like what you were saying earlier about the Walrus and the Carpenter being like a vaudeville act. I noticed a lot of vaudeville influence in your work — obviously in strips like Fred the Clown and Mugwhump, but also more generally with mugs to the reader on punchlines and things like that. What is it that you particularly like about the vaudeville schtick?
I think I absorbed the more traditional trappings of that world (like you see in Mugwhump) through watching The Muppet Show as a kid, actually. I mean, it’s not like I was around for the real thing. More broadly, the fascination with double-acts and that style of banter comes from watching comedy on TV - there’s a lot of that in the relationship between Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmonson, or between Blackadder and Baldrick. And I guess there’s the simple fact that most of my big comedy heroes - the Goons, the Marx Brothers, Keaton, W.C. Fields - have vaudeville or music-hall backgrounds. Even the Pythons and Peter Cook started out doing stage revues. Modern stand-up seems to be the spiritual successor to that world, I think - particularly when you have people now like Bill Bailey or Stewart Lee really broadening the boundaries of what stand-up can include.
There’s also a love of language in Carroll (and, indeed Beckett) that you share with your frequent puns and wordplay. That’s quite a tricky area of comedy to work with — do you feel you have a good sense of what will elicit a laugh, as opposed to a groan?
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| Muppet Sherlock Holmes, art by Amy Mebberson |
I hope I do! I don’t do a whole lot of puns, which is the one area where a groan is virtually guaranteed. I used to do a lot more of those, but lately I’ve been more concerned with character stuff. But yeah, I’m always trying to make myself laugh when I put gags together, even if that almost never actually happens due to the nature of the writing process. I try to avoid just throwing in stuff that’s “good enough” - things I like to think of as gag-shaped holes. They look like jokes and they have the rhythm of jokes, but they don’t make me laugh. I’d rather have no joke than a bad one.
Do you try out your jokes on other people first? I wonder if you could maybe talk a little about your process of writing humour.
My writing hours are generally pretty antisocial, so there’s nobody else awake when I’m coming up with this stuff. Really, I just try to trust my gut. It’s not so much knowing how to write a good gag as it is being able to recognise a bad one and strangle it at birth. And if I knew how that worked I’d bottle it and sell it.
What was it like working with your brother Andrew on those early strips — were you both coming from similar places artistically?
Well, again, it was us trying to make ourselves laugh, or more specifically trying to make each other laugh, at least to begin with. Later on, as Andrew became the more dominant writer, I had to readjust my role a bit and come to think of myself more as a facilitator for whatever he was writing, a lot of which I frankly didn’t understand. And which he wouldn’t make much effort to explain, either - his attitude was, “If you need it explaining to you, you’re probably too thick to be reading it.” Bit of a smartarse, Andrew, at least back then. He’s mellowed.
Do you have any plans to work together again in the future?
No plans, though I’ve made it clear that the door’s always open if he gets inspired. But he’s very much the kind of writer who’ll wait for inspiration to strike and who will scribble it down very quickly - if it’s not something he can knock out in a couple of days in a white-hot frenzy, he’s not likely to do it.
What was your exposure to comedy growing up in New Zealand?
For me it was mainly British imports. We got stuff like The Goon Show and Hitch-Hiker’s Guide on the radio, and Monty Python and Milligan’s ”Q” series on TV - I’m sure there was American stuff as well, but I’ve forgotten most of it (along with a lot of the dross from Britain, of which there was plenty). Audio was big for me - apart from the Goons, there were the Python albums, which was my main exposure to them for years (having been slightly too young to catch them on TV, except for the odd isolated episode I saw when my parents weren’t paying attention). There was a bit of local comedy as well, though most of it was utterly dire. One exception was a guy called John Clarke, who did character comedy as this farmer called Fred Dagg — great stuff. Clarke left New Zealand for Australia after a bit. Anybody who gets any attention for anything creative generally leaves New Zealand, even if it’s only for a while - I think in order to find out if they’re really any good or not.
Was that the reason why you left?
Yeah, that was definitely a part of it. The other major reason was that New Zealand doesn’t have a comic industry of any kind, which is great if you like your comics to be pure and crafted entirely for the noblest creative reasons - the do-it-yourself comics scene there is really strong - but terrible if you’ve dreamed of becoming a professional cartoonist since the age of six. These days there are artists like Ben Stenbeck who can work for Dark Horse from New Zealand thanks to the Internet, but when I was coming up that wasn’t an option.
When you moved to Britain, did you find the sense of humour and comedy was very different?
Well there are two things there — the sense of humour, which I guess means the kinds of jokes ordinary people tell one another, and the comedy, which is the media and the stand-up industry. The comedy in New Zealand, as I’ve said, was largely foreign imports, so I had that as a baseline, although it was a bit of a shock to me when I arrived in Britain to discover that a lot of the very best stuff — Reeves and Mortimer, The Day Today — never reached us Down Under.
The general sense of humour in the pub or on the street was, I thought, very different. I remember the basic New Zealand sense of humour as being pretty coarse and unrefined, without much subtlety; the British sense of humour, by contrast, was more about understatement for comic effect, at least in the circles I was moving in (which, I grant you, consisted largely of cartoonists — perhaps not a typical sample). I suspect that may have changed somewhat in the years I’ve been away, if stuff like Flight of the Conchords is anything to go by. Understatement seems to have caught on in a big way.
Not everyone realizes that The Muppet Show was filmed in Britain, and a lot of British humour snuck into it. I know you worked some more modern British comedy references into your Muppets comic (like Reeves and Mortimer) — was that to be deliberately in-keeping with that tradition?
Not especially, though I thought there was enough overlap between the British surreal/absurdist humour tradition and the sensibility of the Muppet Show for it to be a smooth fit. Really, I just like referring to stuff I like - it keeps things interesting for me, and it rewards those readers who are in the know (without, I hope, alienating those who aren’t). I like finding stuff like that as a reader, so I like to give it back when I can.
What comedians have inspired you?
Spike Milligan is huge for me — my first hero. My comics have long been trying to capture the kinds of images The Goon Show put into my head. Other direct influences include Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Carl Barks, E.C. Segar. Ken Reid (creator of Frankie Stein, Faceache and many other strips for the British humour weeklies), Kurtzman and Elder... probably more if I think hard. And there are plenty of indirect influences, or people who I admire, but if I start listing those I’ll be here all day.
I’m so glad that you mentioned Ken Reid — I’m always slightly disappointed that he gets overshadowed by Leo Baxendale, since I think Reid’s work was a lot more ahead of its time. Did you get The Beano, The Dandy, etc., over in New Zealand, or was that something you became exposed to later?
I still haven’t seen a whole lot of Beano or Dandy. They were available in New Zealand, but I found them less attractive than IPC’s somewhat gaudier offerings for whatever reason — I was reading Shiver and Shake, Cor!!, Whoopee, Monster Fun and Krazy Comic at various times. From which you can probably carbon-date me.
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| Faceache by Ken Reid |
I know a lot of kids (myself included) learned to read from those comics. Did they have a similar role for you, and looking back, can you still see their influence on your art and writing?
I had Carl Barks at the learning-to-read stage — I didn’t discover the IPC titles until I was about 7 or 8 — but I can certainly see their influence on me. Apart from Ken Reid, there were a few other artists whose tics and mannerisms I absorbed at a pretty young age when I was learning to draw, and I still see them popping up in my artwork from time to time — Robert Nixon, particularly, I can see a lot of in my work. And Leo Baxendale’s “Badtime Bedtime Books” in Monster Fun were like my stepping stone to Kurtzman and Elder in retrospect, in terms of all the background gags and the generally ramshackle, seedy atmosphere.
Those British children’s comics had always seemed to embrace the absurd and the anarchic, a trend that didn’t really take hold until much later in American humour comics and even later in mainstream TV comedy and stand-up. Do you think it’s easier to be experimental with comics for young readers, that they’re more willing embrace material that’s a bit weird?
I don’t know about younger readers generally, but I know I loved the absurdist, formally-experimental stuff as a child, and it’s something I see in my own kids. Maybe it’s something to do with the way you acquire knowledge at that age - there’s a lot of smashing two or three apparently unrelated ideas (or toys, or Play-Doh colours or whatever) together just to see what you’ll get. And I guess they haven’t had time to build up vast frames of reference to sort out what’s “normal” and what’s “weird” the way we boring old grownups have. I do think the emphasis on story at the expense of all other considerations that’s been happening in art-comics over the past couple of decades has made it more difficult to do stuff that’s more formally playful — when someone like Chris Staros gets up and proclaims that, “comics are all about story,” I want to get up and shout, “No! They can be so much more than that!” Herriman’s Krazy Kat, widely regarded as one of the greatest comics ever, told one threadbare story every week for decades — its genius was entirely in the infinite variety of ways it was told. I think kids get that.
Is that what prompted your move to all-ages comics, like Thor and The Muppets?
A big part of it was because that was what was on offer and I’ve got a family to feed — I just seemed to drift there. But I was happy to be there for all kinds of reasons — partly because I have kids of my own now, and if I don’t do something now that they can read and enjoy, it’ll be too late in a few years’ time. Partly because it doesn’t take a genius to see that if you only cater to adult readers and never produce anything for kids, there won’t be a new generation of adult readers in a few years’ time to take over from the current one. Partly because I’m of the opinion that, given the ever-dwindling audience numbers for comics now, making comics that exclude a younger readership in cases when the subject matter could so easily include them is commercially kind of dumb (I’m looking at you, every super-hero comic ever!). Alan Moore put this rather nicely a few years back when he observed that, “When Casper the Friendly Ghost has a drawer full of human fingers, you can’t help feeling we’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere along the line.”
I hope you’re not including Thor: The Mighty Avenger there, which is probably the best thing Marvel have put out in the last five years.
Thank you!
Oh, you’re welcome. I don’t know if you saw the report that ICV2 put out recently that shows that children’s/all-ages comics have increased sales by about 65% — I just thought it was so short-sighted of Marvel to pull the plug on that when they did and then a few months later start reprinting your Muppets work because — whoops, there is a market for kids after all. Do you think you’ll ever return to either of those properties?
If Marvel was willing, I’d be up for finishing the original Thor story arc as plotted, assuming Chris Samnee (or someone with Chris’ chops who had Chris’ blessing) was available — four issues and we’d be done — but I was ready to move on from the Muppets when I did. I was feeling a bit burned out and I think I was in danger of repeating myself; Carl Barks did Disney ducks for thirty years, but he was able to add his own creations to the supporting cast to keep it fresh, and I never had the impression that making the Muppets my own thing to that degree would have been encouraged. I was more than ready to work on my own stuff again when I left — better to move on when I was still enjoying it. Very glad I did that book, though. I think it opened a lot of doors for me and it was a hell of a lot of fun.
In some of your early work (Zoot, Art D’Ecco), a huge part of the comedy was the timing and pacing. Was that difficult to carry over into the Muppets format, where gags and story had to be delivered in one-page installments?
Well, it didn’t have to be, really - but I tend to think in terms of one-page units. I think that’s part of the rhythm, actually. Each page is like a sort of maxi-beat, and each panel on the page is like a mini-beat within it. It probably helped with the Muppets that I was drawing most issues so I wasn’t afraid to write twelve panels to a page if the rhythm required it. When I was writing for other artists, I was a lot more antsy about making those kinds of demands on them.
You’ve been writing comics for other people to draw a lot more recently. Is that something that’s difficult to do after being your own artist for so long?
Challenging, for sure - but that’s part of the appeal. I’ve been taking on those kinds of jobs because it seemed to me I might learn something, which I think is definitely, demonstrably the case; I think I’ve broadened my range considerably, and I think my stories have by necessity become tighter and more satisfying because I haven’t had the luxury of “saving” a duff idea at the drawing stage. So, yes — I’m getting a lot out of the experience.
Even though you’re busy with Snarked for the foreseeable future, are you planning on writing more projects for other people?
I’m not sure “planning” is quite the word — everything I’ve written for others so far has kind of fallen into my lap (if writing and drawing my own stuff for a couple of decades counts as “waiting for something to fall into your lap”) — but I’m currently writing an adaptation of “A Princess of Mars”, the first of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars novels, for Marvel — that’s being drawn by Filipe Andrade. I’d like to do more writing for others, definitely. Got a couple of half-arsed ideas rattling around that need working on, possibly after Carter is done — right now I don’t really have the time to start spinning any more plates beyond the ones I’ve currently got in the air.
What is it that keeps you coming back to comics?
Partly because I think there is something inherently subversive and unrespectable about the form; if you can draw, and you want to make fun of something or somebody, you make a cartoon about them. That goes right back to the classroom. We start thinking of cartoons in that way at a pretty young age. Partly because, like standup or prose, it’s something that one person can control from start to finish - if you’re writing sitcoms or screenplays, the delivery of a gag isn’t always down to you, whereas with comics it is, completely. Partly because visual exaggeration is so easy to do, and so flexible - in addition to the written word, you have that whole visual vocabulary at your disposal. And partly because, after a couple of decades of making funnybooks, I’m utterly unqualified to do anything else even if I wanted to.
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