Roger Langridge

Washington City Paper: What type of comic work or cartooning do you do?

Roger Langridge: Mainly I write and draw funny comic books intended for a general audience, which is to say an audience consisting of both kids and adults, although over the past couple of years I've dabbled in writing some more straightforward adventure stories for other artists to draw.

WCP: What work are you best-known for?

RL: Over the last couple of years my profile got a bit of a boost due to my involvement with the Muppet Show Comic Book and Marvel's Thor the Mighty Avenger, so I guess it's probably those two these days. Before that, I guess it would have been my self-published comic book Fred the Clown.

WCP: How do you do it? Traditional pen and ink, computer or a combination?

RL: A bit of both. Although I still draw everything in pencil and I still ink with a brush, there are a few more steps these days where the computer is involved, as my pencils are very small and I blow them up to ink them, printing them out from the computer in light blue so the pencils won't reproduce. And I'm lately toying with a few pieces created entirely digitally, just to see if I can do it as much as anything, though I don't see myself giving up paper and ink any time soon.

WCP: Can you tell us a little about your books that you'll have with you at SPX?

RL: I'll be there with Boom! Studios, who will be launching a collection of older material of mine called The Show Must Go On. I'll also have copies of the preview issue of my new series, Snarked!, and I believe there'll be a limited-edition Snarked! print available as well.

WCP: You've attended the Small Press Expo in the past—do you have any thoughts about your experience?

RL: I've attended a bunch of times in the past, and it's always a fun show. It's a nice size, great atmosphere, not too big, very comics-focused (which is not something you can take for granted these days), and you get a great mix of established professionals and hobbyists and everything in between. And there are always tons of great books there that you can't get anywhere else; the minicomics alone usually double the weight of my luggage.

WCP: What are you looking forward to buying or seeing or doing for this year's event? Or who do you want to see, to catch up on old times, or to have a fanboy/girl experience?

RL: I'm looking forward to seeing a bunch of people I only ever see when I attend a show in the US, as I'm schlepping over from London, UK for this. I've been traveling for the past several weeks, so I'm not 100% caught up on everyone who's going to be there, but I know there'll be plenty of friends to catch up with.

WCP: What do you think will be the future of your field?

RL: It's hard to say right now because everything's in such a state of flux. If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say Marvel and DC will switch to movies, TV and merchandising entirely and let their print departments quietly die away, leaving the medium to those of us who actually regard the comics as the point, the end product, rather than a stepping stone to other media. And we'll watch our readers grow old and die, leaving comics with the kind of audience numbers poetry now enjoys (not that that will stop us!), with the exception of a few wildly successful webcomics, which seem to be to the current generation what newspaper strips were to our grandparents.

WCP: Do you have a website or blog?

RL: Yes I do! You can find me at http://www.hotelfred.com

The Small Press Expo takes place 11 am–7 p.m. Sept. 10 and noon–6 p.m. Sept. 11 at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, 5701 Marinelli Road, Bethesda. $10-$15. spxpo.com.

Three years later, the Northeast D.C. native sounds far removed from those earlier contemplative ballads. She's still playing with electro-soul, but now the sound is a few paces quicker and a whole lot funkier. On AlisonWonderland—Carney's full-length solo debut, which is out today—she channels a bit more hurt (themes of heartbreak abound) and a lot more liberation (musical, sexual) over an upbeat mixture of percussive break beats, breezy funk grooves, and spacey soul melodies. The result is efficient, genre-hopping, and unforced.

It is, indeed, something of a Lewis Carroll concept record: The protagonist falls down a rabbit hole to discover a vast fantasy universe. Sometimes the references are overt: "Off With Her Head" has a frenzied instrumental. Other moments are less Alice, more Alison, from the trippy, cartoonish cover art to the way her gentle soprano wraps around distorted bass lines ("Stellar") and pounding drum loops ("I Wanna Rock").

Contrast that to Carney's 2008 EP, which was too sparse and too rooted in traditional soul music, putting Carney in the uncomfortable position of a typical R&B singer, when she's weirder than that. AlisonWonderland is manic and hyper-chromatic, a bright backdrop for a vibrant and eccentric vocalist.

AlisonWonderland is available for free.

1. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll, edited by Hugh Haughton, illustrated by John Tenniel.
Pop quiz: Without reaching out to any lifeline (parent, friend, lover, child, roommate, neighbor, cab driver, doctor, lawyer, barber/hairstylist, dentist, garbageperson, boss, underling, 1951 animated Disney adaptation or reviews of same, recent Tim Burton adaptation or reviews of same, Google, Wikipedia, library shelf, etc.), summarize the plot (plot = fundamental conflict, narrative arc, climax, and resolution/denouement) of Alice in Wonderland in 50 words or less, if you think there is one. No partial credit.

2. The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life, by James Martin.
I want to be a priest, but not a normal, run-of-the-mill priest with slick-backed hair, bad breath, dandruff, and a cowlick that teaches CCDers about Communion and the Books of the Old Testament and Transubstantiation and the dates of all of the Holy Days of Obligation while, on Sunday, giving sermons about respecting parents and teachers while (when those parents and teachers aren't looking) sneaking handsome tweens into the sacristy for a bit of old-fashioned Vatican-sanctioned sex abuse. Instead, I want to be an unusual, unorthodox, liberal, renegade priest like that severe-looking dude in The Exorcist with a lush mop of jet-black hair who's not just a priest, but a psychiatrist who teaches at Georgetown U. (or at least hangs out there a hell of a lot) and is from New York (The Bronx? Brooklyn? Queens? I'm still unsure after repeated viewings of The Exorcist), and who smokes a lot and runs track in well-fitting sweatpants. I guess I want to be a Jesuit. Everybody knows they'd get all the (over-18 and legally datable) girls, if they (they = the Jesuits) weren't already wedded to Christ.

3. Misadventure, by Millard Kaufman.
This seems to be some kind of hardboiled murder mystery by a recently-deceased nonagenarian ("nonagenarian" = "in his 90s." Don't feel unworthy. Sure, unlike me, maybe you didn't know what it meant but, if it makes you feel any better, I had to double-check the spelling.) author who stormed European and/or Japanese beaches on D-Day (Upon reflection, I realize that this is an incorrect use of "and/or," since it's unlikely that one soldier could have stormed beaches in the European and Japanese theaters on that one fateful day during which the Greatest Generation proved its mettle). I emphasize the author's nonagenarian status because it seems a pivotal point of the McSweeney's publicity campaign surrounding this book. I've thought a bit whether this PR tactic is legitimate—should we be impressed when authors of books are very old or very young?—and have come to no conclusion.

4. White Masks, by Elias Khoury, translated by Maia Tabet.
This seems to be some kind of hardboiled murder mystery by a Lebanese author that was just recently translated into English. I'd have preferred to read it in the original Arabic, but I've been recruited by the CIA (which, eager to exploit my Arabic-language skills, offered me an incredible salary and benefits), whisked away to a black op in an undisclosed location, and, as I sit in this anonymous cafe waiting to swap briefcases with a mustachioed contact (Codename: John Mayer), find that the original Arabic version isn't available in the rogue, non-NATO nation from which I write. As-Salāmu 'Alaykum.

5. Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci, by Joseph D'Agnese, illustrated by John O'Brien.
I finished Calculus before breaking up with math, and so should probably be able to explain the Fibonacci sequence (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21...), and how it's derived, and eloquently discuss its alleged importance in nature, but I had to empty out the part of my brain that stored this information so that I could have better access to arcane plot points of obscure Seinfeld episodes (like the finale of the second season where Jerry and Elaine get back together—FYI, when the third season begins, they're broken up again, with no explanation!). Thus, I leave further examination of the Fibonacci sequence to the 9-through-12-year olds for whom this book is intended.

1. Arshile Gorky: Works, Writings, Interviews, by Robert Mattison and Arshile Gorky.
How to make good art: First, find an all-encompassing ideology (capitalism, communism, fascism, fundamentalism). Then, add conflict (cold war, hot war, guerrilla war, genocide) and privation (famine, death camps, existential angst). Don't stir too quickly – let the misery set in. Expect new aesthetics within five to 10 years, usually impenetrably abstract or eye-rollingly ironic. Serve chilled, and, please, clean up after the suicides.

2. Model Home: A Novel, by Eric Puchner.
Sometimes, in Southern California, things go wrong. Maybe's it's the meth or over-prescribed sleeping pills. Maybe it's the lack of potable water. Maybe it's brash, alienating, Didionesque Western new-ness, or the brash, alienating, unadulterated Brett Easton Ellisonian simulacra-ness. Or it could be Hollywood, or the hot, over-irrigated Valley, or illegals, or the post-1960s, post-Manson cultural fallout, or pop-punk, or suburbia, or Suburbia, or films with ensemble casts that try really, really hard to explain why we're all connected. I guess I'm just trying to say that no one really knows what's wrong with Southern California, so we should all get busy writing novels about it until someone strikes a resonant aesthetic chord and that lucky person, whoever he or she is, will have done "It," and, when I say "It," I mean "written that great novel about everything that's wrong with southern Calfornia."

3. Blind Obedience: The Structure and Content of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy, Meredith Williams.
Wittengenstein. Wittengenstein. Now, there's a name that's familiar. Wasn't he a great Russian filmmaker? No, I guess that was Eisenstein. Wittgenstein was German or, at least, sure sounds like he was. Wait—didn't Wittgenstein have some sort of important position on the Superman, or on dialectics, or on empiricism, or on ontology, or on hermeneutics? Hmm. Maybe that was St. Thomas Aquinas, or Nietzsche, or Hannah Arendt. It's important to keep the Great Thinkers straight, because the unexamined life is not worth living. Socrates said that. Or Plato. But what if the examined life isn't worth living either?

4. A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement, by Wesley J. Smith.
I guess there are ethical arguments to be made—positive normative, empirical, causal, logical, ends vs. means, reasonable, quantifiable, provable arguments—that show the animal rights movement is a huge waste of time, resources, and human lives. But none of those will make me feel any better about eating little baby piggies.

5. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Camille Rose Garcia and Lewis Carroll.
What's the difference between Lewis Carroll and Metallica? Maybe not much—both have a dark side, both make art with creepy, Goth-y narratives, both "get small," both speak the King's English, both had bassists that died in bus crashes and reformed after hiring overpriced therapists while making documentaries. Hold on a second...Lewis Carroll never reformed after hiring an overpriced therapist while making a documentary!

"The vestigial result of something useful in earlier times"—this phrase can describe a number of things (naked pictures of your ex; the Zagat guide; newspapers; &c.). Phillip Prodger uses it to describe Charles Darwin's theory of the human countenance. If emotions evolved biologically, Darwin reasoned, so did facial expressions. It's an idea he put forth in 1872—a year after his Descent of Man—in a treatise titled Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Darwin's Camera is an engagingly literate survey of the intersection between evolutionary theory and photographic technology at a time of accelerated development for both. Darwin came to depend on photography to bolster his speculative argument because, as Prodger notes:

[M]anually produced pictures were prone to all sorts of error.... Besides, works of art are made to communicate ideas, not facts. Artists trade in viewers' perceptions, not accuracy for its own sake.... The comparatively new medium of photography offered a possible answer to these problems, so Darwin began to collect photographs..... Expression extended Darwin's theory of evolution by natural and sexual selection to the realm of the mind; it was arguably his boldest extension of evolutionary theory.

But there's one thing sexier than Victorian evolutionary theory. And that's a photographic taxonomy of expressions published to bolster Victorian evolutionary theory! After the jump, witness the five most striking photo juxtapositions to be found in Prodger's volume.

1. 'Disdain, Contempt, and Disgust.' Or as I like to call it, 'A Visual Refutation of the Idea that Muttonchops Were Ever Advisable':

2. 'Horror and Agony' by Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne. For this shot, Darwin used electro-shock prods to induce the desired expression. And it worked!

3. 'Insane Woman—from Bethlem Hospital' by Henry Hering. In which the subject looks far less insane than any of Darwin's other subjects.

4. ''Oscar Rejlander, Introducing...Mr. Rejlander.' Darwin's chief photog having fun by combining two negatives.

5. 'Astonished Baby'; or, as I like to call it, 'Baby confused as to why [it] appears to be blogging.'