Legend

Gary Evans and Ian Dean meet the comic artist, who has lots to say about his art, his beloved Nexus and everything in between

PASSION PROJECT Nexus continues to be Steve Rude’s focus: “I suspect a line of “co-creator of Nexus” might be etched on my grave marker one day.”

THE ARTIST’S LIFE “Being a comic artist and illustrator is the best life I could ever have, and where I’ll always feel the most at home.”

© DC Comics

Steve Rude has been interviewed by ImagineFX twice – once by phone and again by email. Except, you don’t really interview Steve. You proffer a question then buckle up for a roller-coaster ride of ideas, advice, opinions, anecdotes and digressions – and digressions on digressions. You ask Steve about his current animation project and somehow he arrives at The Beatles signing to Capital Records via Dr Martin Luther King.

Steve is very entertaining and very enthusiastic, and that enthusiasm is infectious. He’s 64 now. So he has a bit of the oracle about him, and a bit of the bar-room philosopher. But for all his opinions, Steve takes the work seriously. He’s been at comics over 40 years, worked with all the famous publishers, drawn all the biggest characters, won a ton of major awards, but his bio reads: ‘Steve considers himself an art student.’

"Steve is very entertaining and very enthusiastic, and that enthusiasm is infectious"

You can’t really interview Steve in any conventional sense, so there seems no point trying to write a conventional article about him. What follows is a kind of incomplete life and times of Steve “The Dude” Rude. Not really a portrait of the artist as a man, more half a dozen blurry snapshots.

They’re twisted parables. They’re strange allegories you can’t quite get to the bottom of. They’re never dull, never predictable, always intriguing, funny, and warm. They’re life lessons, Steve-Rude style. Buckle up.

ON FADS

Steve Rude created sci-fi superhero comic Nexus with Mike Baron in 1981. He met Mike after having his work rejected from a newspaper (a regular occurrence) in hometown Madison, Wisconsin. The editor told Steve about some guy in town who wanted to write comics and needed an artist. Steve was 24 and had been living on food stamps at a YMCA, but he and Mike were “possessed of that youthful overdrive”.