(Except..he sort-of does win love here, in an odd way, because this book is basically a melodramatic movie, and that kind of movie has to have something like a happy ending. But it's a very Fred the Clown kind of happy ending.)
The book is Fred the Clown in "The Iron Duchess." It is basically a silent movie presented as panels on paper, but that's nowhere near the oddest thing creator Roger Langridge has done in comics over his career. He's good at this stuff; Iron Duchess is right up the middle of what he does best: longing love, amusing squalor, smirking villainy, mad science, trains hurtling headlong, mountains carved into the visage of a beloved ancestor, extended dream sequences, the power of the cinema, and amusingly communicative pigs and horses.
I could fill up the page with words about Iron Duchess, but that would be severely beside the point: this is a mostly-silent book, with some information conveyed through printed materials in the fictional world, but no dialogue or captions. This is a story that exists separately from words, in a movie-world that never quite existed, with characters who are sturdy and dependable because we know them on sight -- the beautiful love interest, the grumpy father, the handsome movie star. Well, and Fred. And his pig.
Which is rather the point, actually -- Fred and his pig takes the stuff of standard melodrama and makes it silly. Makes it something more slapstick while at the same time more emotionally true. A nice trick, that. Langridge is good at those kind of contradictions.
I suspect I'm not making the case strongly enough, so let me be blunt: Langridge is a great cartoonist, and this book is him at the peak of his strengths, telling a story in the ways only he can. Yes, it's a fake silent movie about a bumbling, penniless clown and the heiress he falls in love with. So what?
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