MUPPETS COMICS VETERAN ROGER LANGRIDGE DISCUSSES HIS NEW NOIR VISION OF THE CAST!

Roger, you’re no stranger to the mythos of The Muppets. Fans of the franchise will be excited to see you working on more comic book adventures of the characters, which you’ve been associated with going back over 15 years. How has it been to slip back into these voices and their world?

I was slightly alarmed to see my first professional Muppets work was in Disney Adventures Magazine in 2007! It’s been nice to revisit the characters, although one of the things that most attracted me to the original The Muppet Show in the first place — the whole vaudeville/sketch show aspect — is dialed back a bit due to the nature of the current story. One of the challenges has been finding ways to get that kind of variety into the narrative and make it feel like the full Muppets experience.

Beyond the professional side as a writer and artist, what is your history with The Muppets? The overall concept from Jim Henson goes back a whopping 70 years, and has been through so many eras and styles, across TV shows, films, and other media — including of course your own comic books. When did you jump on as a fan?

My first encounter with any Muppets would have been on Sesame Street — this would have been early days for that show, around 1970 or so. Then the original The Muppet Show came along when I was maybe 10 years old. I loved the anarchy of it, reminiscent of Spike Milligan’s writing on the Goon Show radio series, with its cartoonish explosions and big, widely-drawn characters whose nuances only became apparent once you’d got to know them. (At least one of the writers on The Muppet Show also worked with Spike, so perhaps the similarities weren’t that surprising!) Anyway, it was very much my kind of humor.

Expanding on the famous flexibility of the Muppets characters, this series is taking a fun, novel approach with a noir theme. What inspired that idea and take on these characters? Noir is such a delightful genre and aesthetic, how are you planning to incorporate it in the story? Should fans expect a unique approach to the artwork, coloring, maybe the dialogue, or other elements?

I pitched several ideas to the powers-that-be, “Muppets Noir” being one of many — there’s a long history of these characters slotting into different scenarios and genres, “plays within plays” as it were. They seemed to like the noir approach and asked me to develop that one further, so that’s what happened. I’m mainly using the surface trappings of noir for my story — I’m not sure anybody wants Kermit to be a lonely knight in a fallen world, let’s keep it light! — but there’s a lot of fun to be had with those. Dearbhla Kelly (the colorist) and I are having the characters exist in a black-and-white world, although the cast themselves are in color (a completely black-and-white comic seemed like a hard sell!), and we’re using lots of solid black and shadows and just trying to lean into the look of the thing. There’s first person narration from Flip Minnow (Kermit’s noir alter-ego) in a Chandleresque sort of style, and nods to various other tropes of the genre. All good fun!

Dynamite diehards are familiar with you through past collaborations with us, including another noir-esque icon in Betty Boop, and recent Disney adventures with Darkwing Duck and the Justice Ducks. On both of those you handled the writing while working alongside some fantastic artists. This time around, and in line with some of your past Muppets work, you’re also tackling the art yourself. Are you excited to dive into this project with a more top-to-bottom approach? How natural is it for you to pick back up drawing Kermit and company?

I always like to do the whole shebang whenever I can (although I was happy to have Dearbhla handle the colors here, as I’m quite slow at that and she’s great!). It’s part of the appeal of the comics medium for me — one person can see a thing through from start to finish. I’ve been lucky with my artistic collaborators, I’ve had several really great ones — more than my fair share, probably! — but there’s no better feeling than starting with a stack of blank pages and making a completed thing from nothing at all; even if somebody else might do some aspect better than you would, there’s such a deep sense of accomplishment when it’s all yours. And I’ve been doing Muppet head sketches for kids at conventions throughout the break, so as far as getting back into the characters goes, I was already pretty warmed up.

This may be sacrilegious, a choosing-your-favorite-child kind of question, but we must ask, do you have a favorite Muppet to write and/or draw? And perhaps separately, is there one that you love and feel doesn’t gets enough love from fans that you’re excited to spotlight?

Writing: Probably Miss Piggy? She’s got layers. So much of what she says is passive-aggressive subtext (except when it’s actually aggressive!), but it’s all hiding someone vulnerable. Someone not quite saying what they really mean is always interesting to write.

Drawing: Gonzo is always fun to draw, he’s all gnarly and weird! (Uncle Deadly fits into this as well, but I have less practice drawing him and I always need to have reference handy, so it’s slightly less spontaneous and fun.)

Needs more love: I grew up in New Zealand so I have an inexplicable soft spot for Lew Zealand (he of the boomerang fish). I can’t defend it — it’s purely because of the name!

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