Pink Raygun Interviews: Steve Rude
Steve Rude is awesome. Not only is he a talented comic artist, he’s a comic artist with a purpose. Rude has launched his own imprint, Rude Dude Productions to resurrect his character Nexus, which has been in a cryogenically frozen state for nearly ten years, and to relaunch his more recent series The Moth. In the first of a two part interview, Rude talks to Pink Raygun about Rude Dude Productions, drawing Nexus and his dream for the comics industry.
Pink Raygun: You’ve been “The Dude” for decades. How did it feel to have your nickname hijacked by The Big Lebowski?
Steve Rude: This was a situation when someone had to tell me about the movie. When I saw it, I was appalled at the little content and the massive amount of foul language there was, all of which I thought was unnecessary. I don’t like gratuitous anything and I didn’t find it funny or entertaining and I turned it off. If you’re gonna use my name, then represent me as the cool guy that I am.
PRG: You’ve recently launched Rude Dude Productions. What was the motivation behind that?
SR: I was sick of the way comics were done today. My style doesn’t fit into the current vogue of how comics are being done, and this is something that goes back many years. I can’t stand the hyper-distorted figure drawing that comics employ nowadays, and I have a classic style which I think has some universal appeal beyond the trend styles that have been taking place for a long time now, and I wanted to showcase it in a way that would be all my own.
This one day I was driving down the road with Jaynelle after a doctor’s appointment and I suddenly came to a conclusion that had popped into my mind earlier that I had dismissed as something that was meant for eventual suicide, which is self publishing. Then this flash came into my head that not only was it possible, it was mandatory that I do this. The Moth had just been cancelled by Dark Horse after five issues and I have ten years of ideas for The Moth in my head. Now, I’m not a guy who likes to be stopped by external conditions of life. So, I decided that this was what I needed to do to get back on track with the work that I need to be doing in my life.
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For a long time I dismissed the self publishing thing as impossible, like my life wasn’t hard enough as it is. But, the business is in need for someone to point it upwards out of the dark ugly alley they’re keeping comics in and I want to be the one to do it.
PRG: What has the general reception been to Rude Dude?
SR: I get mostly stuff from old fans; people that have been asking for Nexus to come back for eons now. What I’m focusing on are the people who have never heard of Nexus. I’d like to start a trend that is getting away form the kind of ugly art and ugly writing that has taken hold of the comics industry for a good ten years now. The cliche is grim and gritty. People have become irresponsible. They’ve gone too far with this kind of nonsense and I find it physically repulsive to look at. I can’t even have a current comic book anywhere near me when I’m trying to do what I need to do for Rude Dude because I find it repellent.
I want to return comics to heroic fantasy like they were when I grew up. It’s much healthier for someone’s brain. It was a time when we clearly knew who the heroes and the bad guys were, and what it took to defeat overwhelming odds. If that’s the singular message I got from comic books, that’s a great thing to have passed on to someone, especially when they’re young. That’s a large part of what I’m dedicating Rude Dude to: returning comics to the feeling of the great heroics and sense of decency. That’s the best thing you could ever do these days for someone who’s confused or mixed up about who’s a hero and who’s a villain.
PRG: One of the things I like about The Moth is that it’s clean. It didn’t feel overly aggressive or shocking, and just felt good to read.
SR: There’s this line people don’t need to cross. In the 1970s TV started to get kind of an edge to it and started to push the envelope. When trends take hold like that, people tend to think that pushing the envelope is about getting more adult or more realistic, and that isn’t necessarily a good thing. It’s funny to me that people seem to think that the only direction they can go is to be more real. To really show the blood and guts and the agony of death. To me, most stuff should be kept on an allegorical fantasy level. For one thing, it entertains a lot more, and it makes you feel far less polluted inside. When you’re reading the things, you don’t feel bad, you feel kind of good, and good in the way that you can’t wait to find out what will happen in the next issue. The Moth has as much drama and other things that go on in real life, but we just don’t cross certain lines. The swearing thing for example, we were laughing at this, trying to think what we could do for these guys, and we just resorted to the symbols of swearing. Anyone could figure out what they’re saying. Sometimes it rides the line a little bit, but there was no way I was going to use that kind of language because when I was growing up it wasn’t necessary.
PRG: Rude Dude Productions is bringing back Nexus this year starting with a Free Comic Book Day issue. Can you tell me about that?
SR: We’re launching with a certain sense of synchronicity in mind. The Free Comic Book Day book is really a lead in for the series. It covers the history of the last 20 years of Nexus as we launch into issue 99. As some people know, Nexus got cancelled at issue 98. It’s been 10 years now since we got cancelled and now we’re bring it back. It would have been another 10 years if I hadn’t started this company.
That’s why I speak of the importance of the duty that I felt when I conceived of Rude Dude in the first place. It was quite time for Nexus to come back, if there ever was going to be a time. So yeah, there’s a definite tie in. For people who have read it, you have to get them ramped up again and remembering things about the book, and for people who haven’t read it, this is a way to get them to read it for the first time and see if they like it.
PRG: With issue 99, are you picking up the story where you left it off in issue 98?
SR: I thought long and hard about that, Mike Baron and I both did, and there was just something not right about picking up the encumbering story moments that we were building up to in issue 98. When it came for deciding how to do it, both of us felt that we should modify the direction to be more of a reader friendly launch point, rather than have them mired in the stuff we were leading up to had the book never been cancelled in the first place. 99 is not what we were intending to do, in fact I had an entire issue of 99 drawn, which is now going to stay in the pencil stage without ever being inked or written up. We changed it to something that was better for people who had been without a book for ten years. It’s more ground level.
PRG: I have to start getting honest because I’ve never read Nexus. I was just a little squirt in the 80s and in the 90s comics were totally off my radar. I’ve heard good things about it and want to read it, but can’t find it anywhere. So, for someone like me, I should be able to pick up the Free Comic Book Day lead in and issue 99 and be able to follow the story?
SR: If you can’t, write me a letter and tell me about it. There’s going to be a line we’re walking here with people who have never seen it before and the audience that has been with it for twenty or twenty five years. It’s a balancing act. Baron isn’t as sympathetic to the people that would fall under your category, so I’m making sure that I kick his ass really good and get down to basics and try to keep in mind that it doesn’t matter how well Baron or I know it, common sense dictates that if were going to do the kind of numbers we need to survive, and I plan on far surmounting the numbers that we did back with any of the companies we used to work for, we have to walk the line pretty intelligently.
I especially want to know if you got confused someplace. With the Free Comic Book Day book, you’re just going to get a glimpse of what Nexus was all about. When the new books come out, and if you’ve taken a chance with them, that’s when I’m going to be interested in knowing. I want to see how close I got on the mark for people like yourself who are coming in fresh.
PRG: Nexus started in 1981 and it was a co-creation between you and Mike Baron. How did the two of you dream up this character and this entire universe that you created?
SR: That’s actually the easy part. Baron was a very smart guy and he just had this concept in his brain and he tossed it to me and then we got a couple guys locally in Madison, where we were living, to finance the project. Those guys went along with kind of a trend in the day, which was comic books produced by Joe Blows, just like me and Baron or The Justice Machine by Mike Gustovich.
PRG: How does the collaboration between you and Baron work?
SR: Right now he’s driving me crazy. I’m completely devoted to Baron as a brother. We don’t agree on anything, but together, we were the perfect working team. Every script he ever turned into me prior to the new ones were virtually perfect. They were stories that, if I had the ability to be a writer, I would have written myself. It seems my abilities lie in other directions as far as moving a pencil around a page. I’m doing heavy edits and doing a lot of talking with him. He’s very stubborn about acknowledging that there are potentially a lot of new people coming to this book, and at the same time not talking down to the fans who have been with us for a long time. I made Baron re-write the story three times. No one has ever made him do that. No one is tougher on him than me, but it’s called for. I’m not going to let him get away with inferior work and ultimately he’s going to thank me for it.
PRG: Do you ink your own work?
SR: Not at the moment. Jaynelle won’t let me because I’ll get too far behind. If you get a good guy, it’s kind of a fun collaboration. I’ve worked out a system where all the work comes back to me, that way if they screwed up my faces I can correct them.
PRG: Did you have a design process when you were designing the characters for Nexus? Did you have some kind of reference or was it all pulled out of your head?
SR: Those things were all internally developed. Where they come from are from things that you like and admire that others have done. Nexus came from Space Ghost. I watched it when I was a kid and it had a huge influence on me. For us, it wasn’t an issue of life and death like people do now, as in if I didn’t design it right, it wouldn’t sell. I would advise removing that kind of pressure from your brain cells. A good character is comprised of things that make you feel good and other things that you saw that you thought had cool elements to them. And hopefully what you come up with is something that you love that makes you glow inside. Don’t take it so seriously that it takes the fun out of it and ends up inhibiting you from creating ideas rather than the reverse.
If there’s one thing I could impart to young people, it’s the philosophy that I have of getting smarter and not stupider in life. I see all these people, it’s like they’ve gone through their whole life with out learning a thing. I have depression, and my life is an incredible struggle at times. I’ve faced moments of not wanting to be here more than I can tell you and thats just part of the story of Steve Rude. He wants to change the world, but he has all these things going against him, and he has to fight his own nature at times. The more you have against you, the sweeter the taste of success will be. The better person you try to be in life, the harder life becomes. You’ll find yourself being put to the test in ways that are designed to make you stronger, but they are there to teach you wisdom, which is what you learn when you survive trials.
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