Cartoonist Roger Langridge joins us to talk about his work on The Muppets, Doctor Who, and Popeye, finding his niche in all-ages comics, his upbringing in New Zealand, learning to write his own stories, why he won't work with Marvel or DC anymore, and the one character from one of those companies that he'd have loved to work on. It's a delightful conversation with one of the nicest guys in comics!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 24 - The Show Must Go On
[MUSIC] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. You can find The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm, on Twitter at VMSPod, on Facebook at facebook.com/virtualmemorieshow, and on Tumblr at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. I posted the last episode while I was in Frankfurt for a trade show for my day job, and I got back late last week, and still kind of working my way through jet lag time, and only about an hour off from my usual sleep period, so that's progress considering it's only been three days. I got to say, my jet lagging has really did not help last night when I went into New York to do an interview with an upcoming guest, Peter Trachtenberg, he's the author of a couple of nonfiction works, Another Insane Devotion, and The Book of Calamities. I haven't listened back to that recording yet, but I kind of fear that I was a little more scatterbrained than usual, so cut me some slack in December when that one airs, okay? Now, I guess this episode is Roger Langridge, a cartoonist whom I've loved for, well, 20 years. He's got a body of work stretching back a bit longer than that. He's from New Zealand by way of England, and first gained attention in America with a comic called Art Deco, which came from Fantagraphics, and had the pretty funny, zany, surreal comics co-written with his brother Andrew. They went on to collaborate on another comic called Zoo, which I just think is one of the best comics of the '90s. It contains also one of the funniest panels I have ever seen in a comic ever. Since those days, Roger's built a career as an all-ages cartoonist, helping launch a comic book at the Muppet Show, relaunching a comic for Popeye, and doing a couple of other comics that aren't mature readers or adult quote-unquote audience. He also did a self-contained run of Thor for Marvel Comics, but he later made news by announcing he was no longer going to do work for Marvel or DC due to their positions on creators' rights. He recently went on to make a comic called Snarkt, which is another all-ages book that's a tribute of sorts to Louis Carroll, and that comes from Boom Studios. And throughout, he's also done his own comics for years and years, including the wonderful Fred the Clown books and Mugwump the Great and more. In 2011, he put out a book of odds and ends, both older work and some of his more recent stuff called The Show Must Go On, and that was through Boom Studios, too. For years now, Roger's been working diligently online, making sure he's had some creative output through the internet and things that could later be collected and print is sort of a pioneer of the webcomics model in that respect. I've always just adored his cartooning style, as well as his love of Vaudeville, which comes out in a whole lot of different ways in his comics. And I just love the overall joy he brings to his work, so you can find out more about Roger and his work at his website, HotelFred.com, that's H-O-T-E-L-F-R-E-D.com. I got to interview Roger a few years ago for a panel at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. The original interviewer had to drop out, so I got the gig with basically a day's notice. I was nervous, it was public speaking, but once we got rolling, I realized two things. First, I have read a lot of Roger's work over the years, so I had some pretty good questions for him once the conversation started, and two, he's really one of the nicest guys in comics, and that was very, very helpful for when we got rolling. In fact, he made me a gift of a few pages of his artwork, including the one containing my favorite panel ever, which I've now got framed here at home. We recorded this conversation while we were attending the SPX show in Bethesda, Maryland last September, and my only regret about it is that I didn't turn the recorder on in time because we started just a general conversation, and I asked him my standard question about who was your big freak out moment, who in your field did you meet, and just completely melt down around, and if Roger's case was really a surprising cartoonist, it was a gentleman named Kim Dyche, a long, long timer who has these amazing comics about a Waldo the Cat, strange figure, I can't even do any justice to it right now, but I really have to get Kim on the show some time. I think he's got a lot of good stories about the history of comics and his own history within them, but that's for another time. Right now, you get the virtual memory show conversation with Roger Langridge. Roger, thank you for coming on the show, thank you for having me. We're at the small press expo in Maryland, it's a small press comics event, and when I mentioned to someone in the lobby earlier, one of your peers that I was going to be interviewing you today, he said, "But Roger's not small press." So before we get into your body of work, and where you stand, are you small press, are you here as a spy? I'm desperately trying to be small press again. I did some stuff for Marvel for a couple of years, but I don't think they really wanted what I had to offer, and I wasn't particularly interested in what they had to offer. How would you describe your style of cartooning overall, where do you fit, I suppose, in the genre? I don't think I've ever really fit anywhere. I was always a little bit too mainstream for the indie guys, and a little bit too indie for the mainstream guys. In terms of having a sort of polished, cartoony style? Well yeah, there's the polish of what I do, there's the fact that before it was fashionable to do so, I was dabbling with DC, and I did the off Batman comic or whatever, which kind of puts you off the list of the small press guys. But at the same time, my heart has always been in doing my own stuff. I've never really aspired to work on other people's characters, because I was offered work that would pay the bills, that I did that kind of thing. When did you decide you were going to make a living as a cartoonist? When I was six, that was what I never really wanted to do anything else. I paid a bit of lip service to the idea of maybe being a teacher or something, just so my parents wouldn't panic, really. But I never really seriously considered anything else. What were the comics that got you started at that age? The first stuff I remember reading is Disney, Karl Marx mainly. We'd go on long road trips, my mother and my brother and I, and when my brother and I were getting fractures in the back of the car, we'd just get some Disney comics log debtors to shut us up. See, I'm going to turn this car around right now, but that wasn't a long drive down to Florida back, I guess, in New Zealand, you didn't quite have drives of that. Yeah, not quite that length, but it was still enough to annoy my mother. So that would keep us quiet, and there'd be a bit of horse trading, depending on what we were into, but yeah, Marx was big for me from very early on. I could always tell this stuff about it even before I could read. It is kind of funny how we were able to identify those artists and writers when we're in that almost pre-verbal stage, you know, we can't do anything else, but we know these visual styles, we know these storytelling modes. How did that stuff influence you, do you think? What sort of role did it play in the storytelling that you do? I think Marx has been a really big influence to me, I mean, to this day in just the terms of his rhythm, you know, he has this thing where he'll have this half-page kind of beat going on. There's always like a little gag or a little moment of suspense at the end of every half-page, and that was a very big influence on the way I wrote for Fred the Clown when I was doing that, and to a certain extent, Snarked is basically a love letter to Karl Berg's. It's using his kind of storytelling rhythms, I guess, and the way he structures gags and, you know, who builds something up and then have something really fast happening to sort of, you know, bring the gag home. Now, what point did you start drawing? Well, I suppose I always drew, but it began really seriously at this point when I was six. I guess six or seven, I can't remember exactly, but I do remember that I was in a class at school where the teacher, as one of our art assignments, asked us to do a comic strip, and we were given this strip of paper that was, you know, room enough to do four panels or three panels, you know, a gag strip. And I remember covering both sides of this paper with like sixteen panels on each side, and yeah, I think that's when I really got the bug. Was there any sort of heritage for this in New Zealand at all, or did you really have to go abroad? There have been cartoonists in New Zealand, but at the time I wasn't aware of them, certainly when I was six, I wasn't aware of them. There's no comic industry in New Zealand to speak of. Any comics that come out there tend to be self-published things that aren't done for the love of it, which is nice in a way in that it keeps it really pure, you know, there's never any kind of hackery going on, but at the same time it's quite difficult to build your life around it. So I only found out quite a bit later that during the '70s when I was growing up there was this anthology called Strips, which Colin Wilson initially was the editor of. And that was quite influenced by the underground comics. And you had people working in that who, I think Colin's the only one who really made an attempt to build a career outside of New Zealand, but there were other artists like a guy called Barry Linton, who I regard as New Zealand's crumb, he's just in a good way. In an absolutely good way. Yes, yeah, no. I mean, he's got the obsession with busty women and everything as well, but it's just really personal, really beautifully drawn, very much about the self-pacific, fantastic comics with a really distinctive, unique voice. I wasn't aware of that. I got exposed to that in sort of my late teens, I suppose, so yeah, at the time I had no idea that any of this stuff was going on. I was exposed more to British weeklies, I suppose, British humour weeklies, things with titles like Whoopee and Wizarding Chips, which had the one-page strips. It's sort of like a parallel evolution from American newspaper strips, you know, single Sunday page, that turned into one thing in America and to a different thing in Britain, and they sort of took parallel tracks. So that was what I was exposed to mainly, and black and white reprints of American comics, which came from Australia. Are horrible superhero stuff? Yeah, well, it wasn't all horrible because in the 1970s they were doing reprints of things, you know, they were doing... Oh, really old curvy reprints? Yeah, curvy reprints. And 40s reprints, and you know, I was getting exposed to Dick Sprang's Batman stuff and Jack Cole's Plastic Man stuff, at the same time I was getting exposed to curvy's fourth world stuff from the '70s. It was all sort of just one thing for me, it was all happening at the same time. Yeah, it's got to be kind of strange not knowing the context of the history of those comics and just having it all lumped in at the same era. Well, in that respect, when you moved down to UK to start your career, who were you following there? What cartoonist did you start to latch on to? Well, I was fortunate in that I arrived at a time when there was a kind of a boom period in British comics, which, you know, it disappeared shortly after I arrived, but at the time there was things like Deadline was being published, 2000 AD, obviously, that's still going, that's the one survivor of that period. Yeah, I'm a guy who owns a few issues of Crisis magazine. Yes, Crisis was the one. I think it was the Deadline spin-off. No, it was done by the guys who did 2000 AD, it was, yeah, a couple of Grant Morrison runs with Steve Yell that I had to jump in on. Absolutely, yes. Yeah, there was a lot of good stuff going around, there was Revolver, which was another sort of... Oh, I remember that too. Fleetway publication, there was, Viz was, at that time, not only the biggest selling comic in the country, but the biggest selling magazine of any kind in the country. And there were about 60 spin-offs, not spin-offs, but you know, copies of Viz going on at the same time. So there was a lot of publishing activity going on, and I got really lucky in arriving at that time, because I probably wasn't quite good enough to get work otherwise, but because there was just this... It's just a material. I managed to get my foot in the door. So you essentially learn on the fly when it came back? Pretty much, yeah. You know, I didn't even know how to invoice properly at the time. I had to... Dave Elliott, who was editing Deadline at the time, basically walked me through that so that I could actually get paid to get paid. Yeah. And the actual artwork, did you go to art school at all? No, no. I was pretty much self-taught. I did art in high school for a couple of years, but the school that I was going to wasn't really geared for art at all. So there was me and one other guy. Showing each other your style. Yeah, pretty much. And we were the only guys in the class, you know. That was strange. But... Do you think that helped? Well, I formed quite a good relationship with my art teacher at that time, because, you know... You know, a lot of one-on-one conversation. The guy in the room. Ron went more, his name was, and he didn't quite get why I wanted to do comics, but he could see that I was passionate about it, and he tried to sort of... You know, he was helpful in a way that a lot of other teachers hadn't been. So that was good, but he didn't have a clue how to make a career out of it any more than I did. Nobody in the country could do it. Yeah. So... But do you think art school at all would have helped your development, or are you essentially happy with who you are, and just being able to draw? At this point, I think, you know, I've got where I am, and I am what I am. And getting educated on how to do things properly might make me a bit of draftsman, but I don't think it would necessarily make me a bit of cartoonist. Speaking of I am what I am, you did a run of writing and drawing Popeye strips. Were you a big cigar fan? Absolutely. Yes, yeah. I mean, I think it would have been in my early teens. I discovered this... Well, it was a time when... I think it coincided with the Robert Altman film of Popeye. That's around 1982. Well, I don't know when it got out to... Yeah, I think '81, '82 around there, and Popeye's 50th anniversary. So there was this book of Popeye that had a hold of a cigar reprints in it, and I just got totally obsessed with Popeye around this time. And I was actually making claim models of all the Popeye characters, which I've still got these... Wow. Yeah, the whole cast. I kept entering competitions to draw Popeye, and the prize was always a ticket to go see the Robert Altman Popeye film. So I saw it about six times. You were a ringer at that point? You were going to different names or anything? That's art-langer-all, yes. Awesome. That wasn't the first licensed property you did. Apparently was the... Well, you had your DC work, but you're kind of a big claim to fame in recent years. It was working on the Muppets. Yeah. What was that pitch-like, or did they approach you, or did you actually go out looking for that role? It's like a lot of things in recent years. It's kind of landed in my lap without me looking for it too hard. It grew out of Fred the Clown, really. Like everything good that's happened to me over the last ten years has grown out of Fred the Clown. But one of the guys who was on modern tales when I was doing Fred the Clown there, modern tales was a website where a lot of cartoonists did a lot of different things. And I did Fred the Clown there. And another cartoonist there, Chris Chudoyan, was one of the editors on Disney Adventures magazine. And he got me to do some spot illustrations for them. And so I was sort of on Disney Adventures radar when they decided they wanted to do a Muppets show strip. They'd done a Mickey Mouse thing in a kind of undergroundy style by a guy called Glenn McCoy. I think this is his name. And he'd just done this Mickey Mouse thing that was totally in his own style. And that went down really well. And so they were looking for some other Disney property they could do. And artist Vision Orv, yeah, exactly. And so they asked me to do the Muppets show. So I did, I think about twelve pages worth of stuff. And one page of that got published before the magazine was cancelled. So this stuff was just sitting at somebody's drawer somewhere. And then when Boomerook acquired the license to do the Muppets show, which I think actually came on the tail end of them getting the license to do the Pixar properties. And the Muppets was sort of thrown in. We're looking for somebody who'd drawn the Muppets before. And they didn't realize that my brief was to do it off model. So they approached me, I guess, because they'd seen that stuff, which must have been circulating behind the scenes or something. And yeah, so I said, well, I want to do the Muppets show proper, because the whole Vaudeville trappings of that was the big attraction for me. What is your attraction to Vaudeville? I generally think it came from the Muppets show in the first place. I think watching the Muppets show when I was a kid is probably where it came from. But it's also because... It's not really a lot of tradition of it in New Zealand, was there? No, absolutely. It's going to assume not. But, you know, culturally. I was really into a lot of comedians who came up through Vaudeville and through British music hall, like the Goons, Spokemillion and Peter Sellers all were musical artists. I'm walking backwards for Christmas when the songs of my parents played for me. I was far too young, so... Yeah, you won't get the almost very naughty rhyme until you're much older. And people like Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, who I'm a huge fan of, all came up through Vaudeville. So that world was always kind of this slightly romantic, unattainable world for me. And the Muppets was ideal for me in the sense that they had a lot of things that I was doing in Fred the Clown anyway, because I was doing lots of rhyming stuff and these sort of short sketch length strips and the Vaudeville trappings, of course, so all of that stuff I was doing anyway. So when I was asked to do the Muppets, it was a pretty smooth transition, really. What was it like? Well, you have an individual style, I'll put it that way. I enjoy the heck out of it, but you're not doing a cookie cutter sort of drawings. How well was your rendition of the Muppets received, I guess, by fans? And how do you sort of keep an individual style when you're working on somebody else's properties? Well, it's partly I'm not capable of drawing on model to save my life. I'm doing my best to do that, but it never always comes out looking like me. With the Muppets, my understanding is that there were people at Disney behind the scenes who were saying, "This can't work. We can't do this. It's got to be on model." And there was a woman called Susan Butterworth who said, "No, this works. Let's stick with it." She sort of fought my corner. It's because of her that I was allowed to work in, more or less, my own style on the boom stuff. Did you feel it was a success? I felt it was an artistic success. Yeah, I was really proud of the work. Yeah, I enjoyed a bunch. I came across a second or third issue, The Fuzzy Bear, one I just completely captured what the old TV shows were like, which I consider to be some of the greatest art of my childhood. Yeah, it was the TV shows that really, I mean, I've seen some of the films, but it's always the TV shows that really grabbed me, and the initial one on The Muppet Show. Yeah. Because again, it was one of those things where they were meant for kids, but clearly had adult humor, like the Great In The Navy skit, which was just a bunch of Vikings pillaging it. Yeah. Something interesting. Just drawing all done to this Village People song. But anyway, your early work, your phantographics work, things of that oak were essentially meant for, I don't see an adult audience, a grown-up audience. I guess. But sure, the disposable income, yeah, yeah. And the work in the last few years has been, you know, either all ages, or you could say kids-oriented. Was that a sort of a conscious move on your heart, or, you know, sort of what the market demanded? Yeah, it's just sort of something I've drifted into, because it was the work that was offered to me, really. Yeah. And I think after The Muppets, that kind of really sealed the brand, you know. Got your reputation. I am now the kids' artist, so that most of the stuff I've been asked to do in the last few years has been kid stuff. Or occasionally, I've been asked to do a superhero thing that wasn't kid stuff, like Wolverine or something, but I'm not. Yeah, the kind of stuff I've been asked to do that wasn't kid stuff, isn't stuff that I've been really interested in pursuing, so I haven't really pursued it. Good, yeah. It's an odd thing, given that the few times I look at mainstream comics, if I, you know, am in a comic store or something, there are books that I simply would never show a child under a certain sense that are apparently now, you know, no labeling, no mature readers only. So I had been wondering about that notion that, you know, you need comics that kids can actually read and get interested in, so that you have a next generation of comics readers. You sort of feel any sense of responsibility or, you know, more than just towards that? Yeah, yeah. I don't, you know, I really don't see why superheroes have to be full of content that kids can't access, because the concept is fundamentally to be able to children, and it seems to me that an adult can appreciate those comics. They don't have to have gore or sex to appreciate them, they can appreciate them on the level of how well-crafted they are, how well-written they are, or, you know, how realistic the relationships are, or there's all that stuff that can be written for adults that doesn't have to exclude children, so I don't see why they want to throw away money, really. I mean, it seems to me that there's a potential market that they've got no interest in pursuing and they're quite happy to wait for their current market to die. And do you have any ideas for strips or titles that would fit into that mold or? Well, whenever I approach any kind of superhero thing, I always assume I'm running it for a general audience. I try and think of it as a TV show. I mean, Dr. Who, in Britain, has been such a big influence in that regard, and in terms of the stuff I was writing for Thulba Mighty Avenger in Marvel, for Marvel, I was thinking of that in terms of a TV show, a general audience TV show, because partly that was my brief, but partly I was just interested in seeing if I could do something like that. Yep, it's funny, because my co-workers who are new version, Dr. Who fans, I was a Tom Baker guy from the early '80s, that's what we got in syndicate. There's a lot of communication out here. The current ones are interested in who this new Dr. Who is going to be, and I've tried turning them on to some Peter Capaldi TV show from the UK, as well as the movie in the loop, that TV show, The Thick of It, where it is essentially the cursingest person ever. I'm like, "Yeah, so this is your next Dr. Who? I don't think it's going to be quite like this, but this character curses more than anyone you've ever met, including me, and I'm actually pretty bad in the workplace." But yeah, when I saw the Peter Capaldi, that's an interesting casting choice, given the reputation. Yeah, but the Malcolm Tucker character, kind of swearing to poetry, it's just, it's just roles over you, it's fantastic, it's so inventive and so creative. There's a scene from the third or fourth season where my wife and I are convinced that it was being improvised, because one of the characters is standing in the background and he's almost doubled over laughing, like he doesn't even know what's about to come out of Capaldi's mouth next. Yeah, now one of the things I noticed on your site very recently, you're doing a series of public domain characters that you're drawing and posting, and that sort of ties in with a stance you took a year or so ago and a podcast, and it sounded like it was sort of an off-the-cuff remark that's been blown way out of the portion about how you don't want to work with Marvel or DC, the two major comics publishers, largely over ethical issues of the way they treat creators. How has that been received from peers, and am I characterizing it correctly? Yeah, a couple of people are sort of smilingly said, "Oh damn you and your ethics, now we all look bad." I thought what I said was quite measured and responsible. I said something along the lines of, "We want to think about what sort of comic industry we want before we decide what sort of books we're going to work on, and what sort of projects we're going to accept," and what that was reported as by Bleeding Cool was Roger Langeridge refuses to work for Marvel or DC ever again, which isn't at all what I said. Although I had decided not to work for Marvel, it was the Jack Kirby stuff, obviously, which has been an open wound since the '80s at least, and the Gary Friedrich case, which that felt worse in a way, even though the stakes were lower. It felt more vindictive in a sense. I mean it seemed to me the way it was presented and everything I read about it was that basically the removed his abilities weren't a living at all. It was like, because Marvel had been quite good to me, and editorially, I still like all those people that certainly nothing against the editorial, the people I was actually dealing with. But it was like this avuncular uncle who'd been kind to you, you're walking along and you see this guy in an alley kicking the shit out of a pensioner or something, it just felt like mafia tactics or something. Let's make an example of this guy, and they just left such a bad taste in my mouth. And around that time, Steven Bissette wrote a fairly articulate, passionate blog post about why people should not work for Marvel, and it was like a lot of things sort of slotted into place at the same time, and I thought, "Okay, well, I'll just back away from this for a while." And so I made this comment on the podcast, and yeah, it sort of got blown out of proportion, really. But that was about a year after the last thing I'd done for Marvel had been handed in. It had been, you know, it wasn't a new thing. It was something that I'd been living with for a year, by a point or something. Yeah, it wasn't like I was taking a stand really, it wasn't custom anything, because none of my income was coming from Marvel at that point, but it was just something I felt more comfortable. Yeah, it was a place I felt more comfortable being just away from Marvel. I had other options. And again, how did your peers, outside of the damn you language? Yeah, well, he said with a smile on his face, you know. Well, was there any sort of response, or any wish I could do that sort of thing, or... Not really, I mean, I've since seen people like Matt Fraction use the fact that they are working for Marvel, and that they have this high profile, you know, he did this issue of Hawkeye where all his royalties went to disaster relief, and I thought, well, you know, he's using his powers for good, and maybe he's actually making more of an impression and doing more good by continuing to work for Marvel than I did by walking away from it, you know. So whether it was the right decision or not, I'm really not sure now, but it's one I made, and yeah, I'm sort of stuck with it now. None is that guy. And I'm a guy who blew off the, I blow off most super, well, pretty much all superhero movies, but in particular with the Avengers flick, I decided to donate 50 bucks to the Heroes Initiative instead and try and help out some of these, well, basically the creators who came up with all these characters who were, you know, dying penniless and, you know, health insurance and such, I still remember some terrible story about Dave Cockrum coming out around one of the X-Men movies that they, essentially, he was dying in a VA hospital penniless, and the Fox is about to make $200 million from an X-Men movie until some person connected to a PR firm basically called and said, yeah, we can get this guy in 60 minutes and show what the guy who created all of these characters is living like now, or you can take care of his health benefits and they, I think, had him essentially sign away any claim in exchange for, you know, but that's comics will break your heart. Now, something on a weirdly or oddball personal question, how tough was it leaving New Zealand for you? I was left to go to the UK to try and make a living. It was a jump, but it wasn't so out of the blue. In New Zealand, it's not at all unusual for people to take a year off between high school and university or after university and before they have a proper job and just see the world of it, and that's called your overseas experience or your OE, and that's like a big rite of passage for most people growing up in New Zealand, certainly most middle class people. Yeah, just kept going and going. Yeah, yeah, mine just carried on. I did actually go back to New Zealand for a little while thinking that I could work through the mail and that didn't work out at all, so I came back for good to the UK in '93, it must have been. One of the other things about your career, early on, your brother wrote most of your, well, I don't know what the partnership was in terms of writing and drawing, but you were collaborating with your brother in a lot of strips. What was it like moving into becoming a solo artist? Had you found your own voice by then in those terms, or were you still kind of? Well, certainly in '93 or whatever I hadn't really, I was just starting to figure out how to write things that didn't completely suck at that point, but yeah, I've never had a career plan, to be honest, it's just necessity. I was on my own, I didn't have, I tried to continue collaborating with Andrew, my brother Andrew in New Zealand, we'd do it through the mail because E-mail wasn't a thing then, and that was kind of long and drawn out and difficult, and then the book that we were doing together, Zoot got cancelled anyway, so. Which is still one of my favourite comics ever. Thank you sir. Yes, I think you wrote the best review of Zoot we ever got. As a matter of fact, yes. I should dig that up for the fact. I'm probably posted when the blog post for this goes up. Yeah, so it was right stuff for myself or not draw anything really. I did bump into a few people and worked with a couple of other people, Gordon Rainey I did some stuff with, but mainly if I wanted to draw comics it had to be coming from me, so I figured out pretty quickly how to do it, I suppose. I mean, not that quickly. I figured, I started doing stuff, but I didn't really get to a level where I was happy with it for quite a long time. I read lots of books on how to write, I thought, you know, I better improve my game somehow. Does it prove any benefits? Only after a very long time. I read all that stuff and in a way that crippled me for a long time, it was just like this formula in my head that I couldn't see any other alternative to. And it took me about a decade to, once I'd forgotten 90% of it it was actually quite useful. It was much easier to just write what I would write anyway, and presumably that was all on the back of my head informing what I was writing, but it was useful as a diagnostic tool when things went wrong, more than it was, as something to... That's a framework. Yeah, as a framework, yeah, absolutely. Now, what's your drawing technique like, have you gotten digital at this point or are you still... I still like to have an original on paper drawn with traditional materials, but digital has sort of crept into the process. These days, particularly with a monthly book, because you have to crank it out really quickly. I tend to draw sort of the halfway between full pencils and thumbnails at quite a small size, and I'll scan those and blow them up and then print them out as blue lines and then ink those. So the pencil originals are actually really tiny. Yeah. But there is still... You're not drawing onto a computer at the time. No, no. I've dabbled with that. I would like to learn how to master it, but it always takes me five times as long to ink something on the computer than it does to do it on paper. Plus getting it off the monitor is really tough. That was one of my stranger moments when I discovered that Ben Catcher draws everything digitally now. Wow. Yeah. I did a podcast with it. It was alive, so my shock showed in front of 50 people, because I just have always assumed he's sitting in some cramped little, you know, office overtime. Well, that just looks so organic. Yeah. And his last year plus has been all digital, which once that came up at the end of this symposium, we were doing people saying, "Oh yeah, no, you can tell, because the line doesn't do this. It doesn't have that scratchy thing." And apparently, to true connoisseurs, you can tell this. Okay. But of all people, he made the digital jump with both feet. Yeah. Well, the line's blurring, definitely. I mean, just the amount that I've crept towards having digital as part of my process, and, you know, the facility that a lot of people who work digitally can now work with and make it look natural, it's getting closer and closer. We're going to meet in the middle at some point. And you're also, I think, a kind of early proponent of the, well, online comics model, at least in terms of serializing work of yours, it subsequently went into print. Were you, what led you in that direction? Partly, it was because in the late '90s, I had very little actual comics work going on, and I'd sort of fallen into book illustration, and that was dominating most of my time, and most of it was really, you know, sold us during crap. So I, at the time, we got our first computer, or at least our first computer that could do color, because we had this crappy old laptop for a while. But yeah, once we got a proper sort of a Mac, our first Mac, in 1999, I thought, well, you know, I've got this resource sitting in the corner. I can do comics, I can color comics on it really cheaply, and put them on the internet and people can read them, I'd be a fool not to use it. So I started doing a weekly strip just so I had something, you know, one day a week every week that I was doing that I liked, and also just committing myself to doing this thing in public, meant that I had much more of an impetus to actually finish the thing and make it available. With those serials, do you actually, were you thinking, did you have the whole story pretty much in your head, or were you kind of evolving week by week in terms of what you were? My process was sort of developing at the time, I guess, as far as how details an outline I would work on, some of the earlier serials were less worked out, and I would actually change the endings on a couple of them and sort of upload the new endings and not tell anybody. Others were quite carefully worked out, and then a lot of them were just gag strips as well, just week to week, this is a brand new thing, sort of reinventing the strip every week, doing it in a different style or, you know, just to keep it interesting for myself as much as anything. So, yeah, again, no plan. But at least the discipline from that kind of kept you in comics as opposed to, you know, kind of drifting further into the illustration one? Yeah, yeah. When I had enough material accumulated from the web strip, it seemed a logical next step to actually publish it in print, so that then that's when I started self-publishing Fred The Clowners, a comic book, that was in 2001, and that was pretty much entirely stuff that had been on the web. Some of the later issues, I did stuff specifically for the comics, the print comics, but that first one was just retooled stuff that I don't really draw. You may have been the first cartoonist ever to make money from the web. Well, you say make money, self-publishing doesn't, yeah, it's, yeah, I think the first issue is okay, but the subsequent ones were- I was the one buyer who says, "This one order keeps going into New Jersey, I don't understand." You're not doing Marvel or DC work at this point, but is there any one character you would have loved to have done a comic of? I have a fondness for metamorpho. Okay. Yeah. Not so much for the character, but just for the support in cast, they're just this- The girl. Yeah, and the mad millionaire with the weird hair and everything, and Java the eight boy. Yeah, because he's got the eight henchmen. Yeah, yeah. I could spend all day doing those guys. Yeah. What work are you proud of, Steph? I'll print the clown easily, yeah. I'm quite proud of the muppet stuff, but at the end of the day, that's not mine, you know. I won't own it. It's somebody else's characters. Yeah, how important is it to you to have ownership as an artist? Pretty important. Economically, having characters and properties and work that you own means that you're going to continue to make money off of for the rest of your career, whereas with the Disney stuff, you get paid a flat page rate and you never see another penny ever again. Yeah. And- That's Don Rosa. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently, just having up here with that piece from him- Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he's canny the most in that he's trademarked his name, so he actually does get a penny or two off it eventually. And it's still- But it's still- But it's still clear to what the publishers can. Who's work do you read? I sort of dip into all sorts of things, but I tend to read more prose than comics these days. Oh, are we reading? At the moment, I'm reading something by Mark Haddon called- I forgot the name. It's got an Arabian title. Oh, really? Well, the first in the series is the curious case of Spring Hill Jack, I think. Haddon or Haddon, or Haddon- No, I've forgotten his name now. I thought Haddon- No, Haddon is the curious incident of the dog- No, he has read that as well. Okay. But there's- I'll look it up. Okay. Bear with me. It's okay, we can edit. Yeah. Harder. Harder. That's it. Mark Harder. Mark Harder. Yeah. It's sort of an alternate history of Richard Burton, the translator of Arabian Nights. If he'd taken a different decision and not taken a posting to some far off country and written his books, but instead become a secret agent, and this Spring Hill Jack character based on the sort of the urban myth or whatever he is, in these books is a time traveler from like the 22nd century or something, and his interference in Victorian times is what's set Richard Burton off on this different historical path. So yeah, good fun stuff. And do you do any writing in prose, or are you pretty much- No, it's- Stick in the comics. Yeah. I'm not- I'd like to, but finding the time to do it is the tricky part. It's difficult enough to find time to write the comics. Frankly, I'm amazed. Given following your work for 20 years and seeing how sporadically it appeared once upon a time, and then seeing you come out with monthly comics, he's either discovered something or they're simplified. I don't know exactly how you can change pace like that, although- Well, the sporadic period was probably when I was doing illustration work, because I was definitely not working. You're not doing this six weeks on a page and all that. So my work schedule these days tends to be get up at 5.30 and write for a couple of hours before the family are awake, because otherwise I'm not going to get anything done as far as writing goes. And then, you know, during the rest of the family's waking hours, that's my drawing time. Yeah, most of my writing is done in those first couple of hours of each day, which I found really useful. It's a time of day when I'm not quite awake, so bits of my subconscious are sort of sneaking into what I'm writing, which is it can be useful, it can, you know, sometimes be surprising, and also just the peace and quiet. Get up around that time, myself, but all I do is sit downstairs and read to make a coffee. At which point my brain starts to function. Well, what's been the impact of, you know, having kids, having a family on your writing? Is that played some role in the all-ages-ness? It probably has. I certainly see the value of that kind of work more keen- I mean, I always thought it was valuable, but I see it more keenly with kids of my own. I like being able to show them what I've done. And I like that they are proud that that ad has made this thing. And yeah, if I was only doing stuff that they couldn't read, you know, that connection, I mean, I'd just be this guy in the attic, you know? It's probably a good thing to have some pride in what you've done and, you know, not be embarrassed in front of your family. Yes. Roger language. Thank you so much for coming on The Virtual Memory Show. Thank you very much for having me. And that was Roger Language. You can go to hotelfred.com to check out his work, and if you've got kids, pick up his first Muppets comic and help warp their brains a little. I think it's some really great stuff and a good introduction to the Muppets as a phenomenon. That's it for The Virtual Memory Show this week. Our show next week will feature a conversation with Human Majd, who has a new book coming out about the year that he, his wife, and their eight-month-old son moved to Iran. It's called The Ministry of Guidance Invites You to Not Stay. Until then, I am Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]