Comic Book Resources

SDCC '09 | BOOM! Studios exclusives, plus signing and panel schedule

BOOM! Studios has several SDCC exclusives this year, including hardcover collections of their recent Incredibles, Muppet Show, Cars and Farscape limited series. They'll also have a preview book of their upcoming Kill Audio comic by Claudio Sanchez. And signing at their booth during the con will be Sanchez, Mark Waid, Muppet Show writer/artist Roger Langridge, Farscape creator Rockne S. O’Bannon, Eureka’s Andrew Cosby and Ed Quinn and many more.

Check out their full schedule after the jump.

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Talking Comics with Tim: Roger Langridge

The Muppet Show #4

Given today's announcement that Roger Langridge will be appearing at this year's San Diego Comic-Con, it seemed like the ideal time to run my email interview with him regarding his Muppets work at BOOM! Langridge's industry profile has been elevated by his recent Muppet work, and it was my pleasure to interview him about it.  His grasp of the Muppets characters is amazing and given that I'm a longtime fan of the Muppets, I'm truly enthused when he says some of the characters have "hidden depths you could spend a lifetime mining." I could spend a lifetime reading what Langridge mines, honestly.

Tim O'Shea: Your Muppet work for BOOM! Studios was the first time I saw you work in the Muppet-verse. But you worked with the Muppets back with the Disney Adventures magazine. How much has your Muppet style changed (if at all) between the Disney era work and now?

Roger Langridge: The Disney Adventures stuff was a bit less on-model; they'd been running some Mickey Mouse cartoons by Glenn McCoy that were drawn in a raggedy, undergroundish sort of style and they were popular enough that they were looking for something similar with the Muppets, so I was encouraged to just go with my own style entirely. The BOOM! material, being more in the nature of a piece of official merchandise, is stylistically somewhere between that and the official models: not entirely my own take, although still recognisably "me."

O'Shea: How did the Muppet assignment come about--did you contact BOOM! or did they seek you out?

Langridge: They found me! I guess the unpublished Disney Adventures material had been circulating behind the scenes, and I suppose somebody liked it well enough to track me down.

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What Are You Reading?

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow?

Welcome to What Are You Reading, where we talk about stuff, but mostly books, especially comic books. Our guest this week is our fellow CBR blogger Brian Cronin, whom most of you no doubt know via the excellent blog Comics Should Be Good and author of the new book Was Superman Was A Spy: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed!

To discover what Brian and the rest of the crew are reading, simply click on the link below.

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This is what we call the Muppet Show!

From "The Muppet Show" #1, by Roger Langridge

I never thought I'd miss "Can't Wait for Wednesday," the labor-intensive comics-of-the-week feature I wrote with Chris Mautner at our former online home. But this is one time I wish we were still doing the column, if only so I could name The Muppet Show #1 as my Pick of the Week.

I grew up with The Muppet Show, both in its original run and in later rebroadcasts, so my opinion is undoubtedly tinted a little by nostalgia. But, man, Roger Langridge really nails it. This first issue -- out today -- is the next-best thing to watching the TV show. All that's missing is the celebrity guest host.

If you need more convincing, Langridge provides a glimpse of a panel from Issue 3, featuring Gonzo as the Mad Hatter.