Artist and writer Steve Rude has spent 45 years in comics with no end in sight. He has won numerous awards, including the 1984 Russ Manning Most Promising Newcomer Award, the Kirby Award for best artist in 1986, an Inkpot, and 8 Eisner Awards, to name just a few. His work has been featured in numerous juried exhibitions. Although he is best known for his work on Nexus—a comic book featuring interstellar assassin Horatio Hellpop, who is also known as Nexus—Rude has worked for all the major comics publishers and drawn many of the industry’s most iconic characters. 

Daily Dragon (DD): Welcome, Steve! How did you break into the comics industry? 

Steve Rude (SR): Perseverance. Along the way, I did a lot of jobs. My first was working at a country club, washing dishes. A lot of dishes. I sold Kirby vacuum cleaners door to door, and I worked at the IRS, moving baskets of folders from one room to another. 

I loved comics when I was in grade school and middle school, but then I lost track of them. I don’t remember why. In high school, I moved the third time to a very remote spot in Upper Michigan. I didn’t have any friends, so I asked my dad to stop at a drugstore. I wanted to see if they still made comics. This was in 1972.  

I walked in, and I was excited to see that they still made them. But things were different. The people I remember from the ’60s were still there, but new people were coming in. And they had styles that were different. It was kind of unsettling to me because I was used to what I was used to. 

I decided to experiment with some of them. One was called Master of Kung Fu. I was a big fan of Bruce Lee and the Kung Fu TV show, so I bought it. It took me a while to get used to it, but there were advancements in storytelling that the prior group from the 1940s on had never gotten into. It was new storytelling territory. That was part of what the ’70s group, the Vietnam-era people, were bringing to the field. With each generation, approximately every 10 years, there are going to be changes. And these changes are unanticipated by most people until they happen. I experienced that in the 1990s, when the ’80s style of superhero costume design was changing. It went from sleek exterior designs to pockets, zippers, and belts.  

I was a little lost for a while. I decided to experiment with fine art. It was not for me. I wasn’t compatible with most of the people in the industry, so I got out. I went back to where I belonged, in the comics and commercial art that I loved. I wanted to be like my illustrators, and they were the people who came from the warrior era.  

DD: What led you to working on Nexus?  

SR: I remember being in my twenties and just terribly excited about here and now. We had beautiful summers, I was living on campus, there were always gorgeous girls everywhere, and I was young. I wanted to see what I could do. I loved working hard. I loved drawing. I loved comics, and that was a result of the rediscovery in 1972 in my little town in Michigan. I really got hooked then, and I realized this is what I want to do. So I went about doing it in a way that was unique to me. I just sat there, opened up my comics, and started to copy them. It was fun. That’s how I learned most of what I learned—just by copying. Still do.  

Luckily, I was very driven to learn. I love learning things. And when I met [Mike] Baron, he was the conduit to my future because he was a writer. We got together, came up with the idea of Nexus, and drew the first 12 pages. This was in 1979. Baron was a real hustler back then, and he knew everyone in town because he was eight years older than I was. He went to the two guys who ran a distribution arm of magazines and comics, Capital City Distribution. He asked if they’d ever thought of doing more than distribution.  

We had a little debut show at one of the unions on campus. We set up my first 12 pages there. They looked at it and said, “Well this sounds good. Let’s give it a shot.” So we did, and then the oversize magazine came out, the black-and-white magazine [in 1981]. Because of other developments in the industry, they canceled the book after issue number six. I felt they hadn’t given it enough time to find its audience. 

Unfortunately, we’d sold them the rights. There’s a mindset in comics that doesn’t think about legalities. It’s never been something that was in the forefront of our minds. But that’s just due to ignorance, so it’s our fault. 

DD: Since you’re still producing Nexus, can I assume that you got your rights back at some point?  

SR: We eventually got our rights back from Dark Horse after they stopped publishing it. 

DD: One of the things that I hoped we might talk about before we closed out is Space Ghost. How did you come to work on that? 

SR: I was nine when the show aired. There was an orchard in our neighborhood. I remember us kids hanging out in the apple trees and talking about this show we just saw about a guy in a black hood in a cool-looking ship. We just thought it was the coolest thing we’d ever seen. And that’s how it starts. You see something. If you’re lucky in life—and I hope everyone has this at some point in their life—you see something so overwhelming that it stays with you forever.  

Comico came up with the opportunity for me once they brought the rights to it. They called me up. This was 1986. That year was pivotal to me. I was getting a lot of notice from the big companies, and I had the chance to do Space Ghost. I threw myself into the project. It was a one-shot, so it took me probably two months to do it.  

DD: Switching gears, your bio lists both Russ Manning and Jack Kirby as influences on your work. To a non-artist, they have very different styles. Can you tell me what you took from each of them?  

SR: Well, Magnus, Robot Fighter was a classically drawn book. It had that classic male feature kind of stuff going on. And the stories were so real to me. They still scare me. So I got that from Manning. From Kirby’s art style, I got hyperdynamics. 

DD: You also have continued to study art by participating in workshops. Many people at your stage of a career don’t do that, so I’m curious as to what draws you to workshops.  

SR: Honestly, I don’t understand people that don’t do them. There are so many opportunities out there to learn from others. And the things I’ve gained from them are incalculable. I haven’t done it in in probably 10 years, but I attended so many workshops. I moved from my hometown to LA to study with the best schools and teachers in the world. I could not do what I do without their help. The quest for knowledge is perpetual. I don’t know everything, and someone else could come in and teach me things that I would never think about. That’s exciting to me.  

DD: I noticed on your website that you have the fundraiser coming up in September. Do you want to highlight that? 

SR: The thing that you’re talking about is the 45th anniversary of Nexus, the story of Nexus. And that’s going to be fun.  

DD: Why do you like Nexus so much?  

SR: Well, because it’s everything that I hold dear in my life. Everything that’s part of my personality, that excites me about life. It makes me want to sit in a chair and get a pencil out. Horatio is an alter ego.  

DD: One of the things I’ve always liked about that series is the dynamic between Horatio and Sundra Peale.  

SR: Well, sure. Relationships are what life is all about. Everything is about a relationship. It’s about you and anyone else you happen to interact with.  

DD: Then there’s also Judah, which is a different relationship. It’s a very diverse set of supporting characters with very different interrelationships. Did you set out to do that deliberately, or did it just evolve that way? 

SR: I think kind of both. Things evolve because you evolve. You’re looking like this, you’re doing something one day, and then later on at the end of the day, you get this weird thought in your head. And you act on it. I don’t know where it comes from, but it comes from somewhere. When it feels right, I just do it. 

DD: Is there anything else that you would like to say or that you would like people to know about Nexus and what’s coming up for him or for you?  

SR: My biggest goal in life that I haven’t achieved yet and have been working on is that I’m producing material for a Nexus cartoon show. It has always been next for me, but to get it done, I need to raise a couple million dollars to pay the people who come aboard. I’m going to supervise everything and do most of the work. I’ve told people in the very beginning, I will literally change the world once this gets on the air.  

Another life goal is the hard covers, deluxe editions, books that are all mine. Baron’s doing his own thing. We’re on different tracks, and we’re both doing our own versions of Nexus right now. I think that what I’m doing is terribly exciting.  

It started with a book called The Coming of Gourmando that was around a 100-page story. The book itself was much longer than that because we put a lot of extras in there, and this is all me, whatever I want to do.  

After Gourmando came The Battle for Thune World. And I think these things are tremendously well done. They are all chronological. The one after that, the one I’m working on now, is called Return to Earth. There are huge upsets on Ylum, and Nexus moves to Earth. It’s all about changes. What I’m writing shows what kind of changes and how people deal with them. 

If you haven’t seen those, I would say they’re must-reads.  

DD: For more information about Steve Rude and his work, visit his website, https://www.steverude.com.