Fred the Clown

Book excerpt: Fred the Clown is fit as a fiddle and looking for love in this ode to silent cinema by an acclaimed cartoonist. This nearly wordless romp from master cartoonist Roger Langridge is the author’s paean to the silent, slapstick comedies of the 1910s and ’20s, spun for a contemporary audience, starring his most popular character. It finds our hero Fred pitching the woo to a lovely equestrian. But with matrimony-minded fathers, boorish beaux, and malicious mad scientists interfering at every opportunity, what’s a clown―and his faithful pig companion―to do? Langridge’s velvety grays evoke the silent films of his patron saint, Buster Keaton (and, in this volume particularly, the latter’s masterpiece, The General). His craft is at a zenith, and captures every screwball twist and turn of the heiress’s and our hero’s romantic roundabout.