3 out of 5

It isn’t really right of me to review this collection of Roger Langridge’s off-series shorts / one-shots, seeing as how I’m not a Roger Langridge fan.  For me, The Show Must Go On! just served to dramatically underline that – this was a chore to read – but obviously it also lends itself to the question: why was I reading this in the first place?  The answer is for that other writerly credit: Gordon Rennie.  I am a Rennie fan, and the three pieces collected here – Kabuki Kid, Dr. Spin, and Rave of the Living Dead – are easier and cheaper to read / purchase via this trade than they would be separately.  So while I will comment a bit on the trade itself, and on Langridge, that rating is more about the Rennie material.

First: the book itself is pretty handsome.  Slightly off-kilter dimensions give us wide pages to experience Langridge’s dense, detailed art, and whether black and white or color, the printing is bright and crisp.  The illustrated table of contents is a little confusing (things are grouped by character appearances instead of in order), but it’s still a great touch, and except toward the start and end of the book, it can lay fairly flat for reading, which I appreciate.

Second: the overall contents.  Langridge leads us in to explain that this book serves as a catch-all collection for some of his favorite bits that have gone missing off the edges – creator-honed stuff that would’ve appeared in DHP or elsewhere that maybe didn’t get the same attention as his illustrator-for-hire works.  The largest contribution of these is a 70 page set of stories featuring barker / ventriloquist Mugwhump the Great, which at first appears to be an ongoing set of calamities affecting Mugwhump’s troupe of entertainers, but then turns in to a cluttered attempt at giving a backstory to Mugwhump’s partner / puppet, Billy.  This didn’t do much for me, doing my best to set aside my Langridge-judgments, because it didn’t feel like Langridge actually effectively plotted anything, instead structuring it around a set up joke that he, like, retroactively wanted to make more serious.  It feels excessively long without amounting to anything.  His shorter bits fare better: Doctor Sputnik’s experiments-gone-wrong give us a good snapshot of Roger’s combo of sci-fi / horror creatures and his affectation for slapstick humor; his navel-gazing committee-approved social commentary in his two-page Frankenstein Meets Shirley Temple shorts; and, to me, the standout – Jack Shit vs. Leppo for rulership of Hell.

Throughout this stuff, one’s appreciation for Langridge’s style will be the selling point: I find his comic timing oddly off – actions and punchlines slightly out of sync – which hinders the (for me) main appeal of his work: the art.  Furthermore, Roger draws a very animated, cluttered panel, and he puts an equal amount of weight into foreground and background.  As most of this book is black and white – no grey scale or pop colors to guide the eye to a focus – the readability of any given page is affected, doubling down on that timing issue.  (Some of the later bits, in color, are much, much more enjoyable.)  And, of course, his jokes, which are almost exclusively dad jokes / safe “risque” humor, lampshaded to heck.

Okay?  Okay.

To Rennie: Kabuki Kid fares the worst.  This reads like Rennie writing for Langridge, giving him a pun- and hijinks ready protagonist who can be tossed into random battles for a few pages, and then end on a yuk.  The two leads – Kid, and his partner, Lu-Win – “martial arts Marxist and follower of the great prophet Mao” – spout some delightfully goofy Rennie nuggets, but as this is subject to the timing / cluttered issues I mention above, it’s a miss.

Dr. Spin, a self-aware tale of a forgotten hero battling continuity issues, is a much better match: the same kind of inventiveness that gave us his meta Sherlock Holmes tale trawls some of the Golden Age / Silver Age / Modern Age commentary guys like Moore and Morrison have done, but, y’know, in a much more compressed, light-hearted, and goofy manner.  Langridge is kept more in check by an actual plot, here, and his panels are really well balanced, and appropriately comic booky (instead of his more bombastic, cartoonish style).  It’s not necessarily a hidden gem, but it’s entertaining.

Rave of the Living Dead, in color, is nonsense, but it’s also great.  It almost doesn’t look like Langridge, with character work, the garish colors, and the general ghoulish surreality of it making it look closer to White Trash.  It’s a short bit that has a rave run by zombies, then draws a line to 90s alarmist reactions to rave culture, but it’s such a short explosion of willfully dumb ideas and awesome art that it work.