Multiversity Comics Presents: Jim Rugg

For fans of Big Two comics, Jim Rugg is a relative unknown to you. Outside of that world though, he and collaborator Brian Maruca are extremely well known for their work on books like Street Angel and this year’s critically lauded Afrodisiac from AdHouse Books. That book has earned the two of them near universal praise, and the adoration of your’s truly. Rugg’s art can also be seen monthly in The Guild from Dark Horse Comics and Felicia Day.

I spoke with Jim last week about Afrodisiac, his inspirations, laughing in awkward places, and a whole lot more. Check this interview out after the jump, as it’s one of my all time favorites from MC.

First off, I wanted to thank you because as someone who grew up playing video games as Shaft, has the middle name Leroy, and always wanted to be a character in “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka”, I just wanted to say it was awesome to read Afrodisiac.

Jim Rugg: Are you African American?

No (laughs), I’m white, which is the odd part.

JR: Well…(laughs) I’m glad you enjoyed it.

Afrodisiac is one of my favorite characters in recent memory in comics. How did you and Brian create him, and how did you come up with the overall concept of the comic?

JR: Well, we created him as a supporting character in our first book Street Angel. He just started out as a…we had a number of colorful characters in that series and he was just part of that progression.

About the same time as we came up with the story for him in Street Angel, we had the chance to do an anthology piece. We had a bunch of ideas…the way we work is we tend to brainstorm a lot of ideas, and ultimately you cut out 95% of them so they fit into whatever anthology or single issue or story you’re working on. If it’s something really good, you come back and revisit it and with Afrodisiac, we had a lot of ideas, so the character just kind of grew out of that.

Essentially we have this idea pile, and if we like the ideas enough we tend to revisit…to go back to those. If not we just discard them. The way we work, we end up creating a lot more ideas than what actually gets turned into comics. With Afrodisiac, part of it…Street Angel…have you read Street Angel?

I actually have it on order, right now.

JR: So Street Angel is this homeless girl and she was created as something of a backlash to Marvel and DC characters. You know how Peter Parker was supposed to be this nerdy guy and originally I think they captured that a little better. It was easy to relate to as a comic book nerd, to this nerdy character.

Eventually over time he’s beaten every threat you can imagine multiple times and had this supermodel wife, or he did for a while or whatever, and he was no longer this underdog nerdy type.

So with Street Angel, we were like we’re going to create this character who is super badass but nobody on Earth would actually want to be her (laughs).

Because she’s homeless and she’s…

JR: Yeah, and her life sucks.

So as a result we ended up with this character that was kind of the ultimate underdog. From that point of view it was easy to put her in any situation and be able to write her.

Afrodisiac was kind of the opposite. Afrodisiac is this superstar kind of character…Alpha male, top of the food chain sort of guy. So I think part of our interest in him might have been he was almost the opposite of Street Angel, and we were working with Street Angel all of the time back then so he just grew out of that.

Yeah, I guess he really is the opposite in that he gets all of the girls (even the ones that aren’t interested in him), he wins in every situation, he’s really…the consumate…badass.

JR: Exactly.

That’s very cool. Basically you come up with the big group of ideas and develop the concept from there.

JR: No, no the concept and the ideas are one and the same. It’s just the idea of “oh, we could have this character doing a monster story!” like the one with the giant cockroach. That was one where I thought of the climax, with the car punching the monster (laughter) and I really liked that imagery. I thought that was something we could pull off in comics and it’d look good and stuff, but we didn’t do that story for two years because there wasn’t really an outlet for it. It kind of just went into the idea pile and sat there until there was an opportunity for us to work it into something.

The characters and the ideas usually develop together. If you have a great idea for a character it’s usually within a situation. Characters are defined by their actions, so it’s not like you’re like “oh, this is the perfect name for someone!” or “this is the haircut so we should put on someone!” It’s all mixed together.

Wait. So it didn’t start with a glorious afro?

JR: (laughs) No, you know, I can’t quite remember how the first story came together. It was a confluence of things when we first started working on it, like the very first story has him as an old man and he’s bald. It flashes back when he talks about when he was a young man and a superhero in the 70’s.

But it happened…that first story is probably five years old and I honestly can’t remember what made us decide to have a Blaxploitation character or anything like that. That one came together pretty quickly and then we were left with all of these ideas, like wow…we could do this with the character.

Yeah, you opened up this whole new universe.

JR: Yeah.

Well, going into the influences. Obviously you mentioned the Blaxploitation films, but my mind also went back to the old Heroes for Hire, Iron Fist and Power Man stuff. What were all of the influences that took place in the creation of Alan Diesler, the Afrodisiac?

JR: Well, Blaxploitation films are probably the biggest one. Whenever we did the first one, the only movie I’d seen was Shaft. In the course of the last five years, I feel I’m almost an expert of Blaxplotation films (laughter). So, you know, it was kind of a long development, that book, because we’d do a short story here and an anthology there and in that time we were able to go back and to visit all of the Blaxploitation films. So those were a big influence.

I think Gangster Rap of the late 80’s and early 90’s was probably an influence, just because I was a kid when that stuff started coming up. I started hearing NWA and stuff. So I think subconsciously that stuff started to enter my pop culture…the stuff I was taking in and it was a very strong…I think in terms of pop culture has become so influential. That was fairly early on in its rise…I mean, Yo MTV Raps was when I was a little kid.

Sounds like we were both growing up at the same time, which is why we both enjoy this stuff so much.

JR: Right. But a lot of that stuff was definitely second hand.

You know, a big influence for me was Tarantino’s stuff. I always tell people there were three major waves of Blaxploitation pop culture. Obviously the 70’s films were one. Then the emergence of gangster rap in the late 80’s seemed to reference a lot of that material, like the Mac…Ice T was really into the Mac.

Then Tarantino in the 90’s continued to reference it. And Tarantino was probably my entry point. Then I reverse engineered back through, back through hip hop and eventually going back to watch some of the original movies.

It wasn’t just Jackie Brown. He’s got a lot of the influence in all of his films.

JR: Yeah, even in interviews. He talks about different movies he likes. Like Coffee…he talks about that movie a lot.

One thing I noticed in the book is that there are very few segments that expand more than a few pages…when you were developing it, why did you and Brian decide to keep it to these little staccato story beats instead of going into one larger story.

JR: Hmm…that’s great. Well…hmm. There’s a lot of different directions I could go with this.

Let’s hear them all!

JR: One thing I’m really interested in, and I actually just listened to a lecture on it two nights ago, so it didn’t go exactly into the creation of the book. Maybe on a subconscious level, but it was on how format dictates content. So as a result, a lot of that material, probably half, has appeared in print in anthologies. So the shorter stories are as a result of people going “hey, do you want to be in this anthology, you can have four pages? Or 8 pages?” but they were shorter sections.

Another big influence for me was I started watching old grindhouse film trailers, and I started falling in love with a lot of the story telling mechanisms. A lot of those trailers are far more entertaining than the movies would be, if you tracked down one of those movies and watched it, 70 minutes would feel like 3 days.

(laughs) I actually have regular bad movie nights where we watch movies like that.

JR: Certainly some of those movies are entertaining.

But some of them fall into the “so bad they’re good” category.

JR: I actually don’t believe in the “so bad they’re good.” I kind of feel like things are either good or bad, but I know what you mean by the phrase.

So I was watching hours and hours of film trailer compilations and really liked some of the storytelling mechanisms they were employing. You could essentially be able to tell exactly what happens in these movies by watching 2 minutes. I wanted to try and capture some of that.

There’s also, I’ve noticed it more since the internet has been around, but the phenomenon of people showing a panel out of context. The panel will be beautiful and really interesting, and then you go back and read the work and you don’t even notice the panel, you’ll read right past it. There’s something about taking the panel out of context that kind of changes everything about them. I’m very interested in that phenomenon, and that was a big part of that too.

One of my favorite aspects of the book was the covers. Were those added for a storytelling purpose, or were they just really fun to create…or both?

JR: Those were actually from the very first Afrodisiac story in Street Angel.

Oh.

JR: When he tells his back story, he kind of covers “I used to be a superhero” and it cuts back to the early days of Afrodisiac and you get to see the cover. When he’s talking about his younger days, it’s told as these flashback panels like you’re looking at an old comic book. Towards the end of him recapping his younger days, he talks about the end of his superhero days, so we have little bits of that in the first story as well.

I like how whenever I was a kid, comic book covers were often very intriguing. You know, they’d pack a lot of story in the cover. I loved that, and I think when Joe Quesada took over at Marvel, and it may even go back to the early Image days, it became where the cover is the pin up.

The cover would have word balloons and hyperbole and that Stan Lee style of writing. All that stuff was great to me when I was a kid, stuff I’d be drooling over. “Batman’s going to die in this issue!” “How could they ever stop this super villain?!” I feel like that’s been lost, but that was one of the things we were trying to do — can you use covers as storytelling mechanisms? Clearly you can. A lot of comics history that was a big part of what they did.

I wonder why they went away from that. When I think back to the comics from when I was a kid, it seemed like the covers were designed to draw your interest and they don’t seem to do that anymore.

JR: They don’t have to do that anymore. Ever since the rise of the direct market, covers don’t really have to sell comics. Whenever they were sold on news stands it was really important. News stand distribution was really inefficient, they might print 600,000 copies of a book and only sell 250,000, so 50 or 60% of them might be thrown away. You literally were fighting other content on the racks for sales.

Direct Market, when you see that title on the racks it’s already been paid for. I wonder as we move to digital distribution, I’m not sure there is much of a purpose for covers anymore. I bought a podcast off…I just go on iTunes in the morning and grab a bunch. They have that little icon which I guess you recognize as a brand, there’s no cover to that stuff.

The response to this book has been incredibly positive, with people seemingly coming out of the woodwork to tell me about the pimping game of Afrodisiac. Has the overwhelmingly positive respond been surprising?

JR: Yeah, it has been. We’re reprinting the book right now and when our first print run we increased it by almost 20% at the last second. This was before we had any…I guess we had Diamond orders at this point, but we really had no idea how it’d perform. It’s completely outperformed our expectations. It’s been very good…and surprising (laughs).

It’s just such a well told story. I think in the modern days, eventually well told comics will get into people’s hands.

JR: I think that’s one of the shifts in marketing today. If everything becomes available, I think quality becomes more of a commodity than it used to be. Hopefully.

Especially with the way the internet is. If you’re found out as a product that is not very good, people will talk about it pretty much immediately. Same thing for if it is good.

JR: Yeah, and I think having access to pretty much everything that’s been created in the last…(laughs) changes the way you consume it. It’s no longer a collectible market of “oh, I heard Frank Miller’s Daredevil stuff is good, and now I’m going to spend years going to shows tracking them down.” Now you click and you can have all of them in the next 30 seconds, and if they’re no good you move on to the next thing. It’s a lot different than it was 15 or 20 years ago.

I remember going to the comic shop when I was little and thinking “oh my god, the new X-Men comic is in” but I was six, so I could only afford like…two comics. Now I can just go online or go to the library or do any number of things. It’s very cool.

JR: It is. It’s a major sea change, I think.

As near as I can tell, the Afrodisiac has the origins of a blaxploitation versions of Spider-Man, Thor, and Captain America, is a hyper acronymed cyborg, gained his powers from the Devil, is a left for dead scientist sticking it to the man, and I’m sure there are some I missed. Which is your favorite of his origins, and are there any that you cut because of space or sheer absurdity?

JR: I’m sure that we cut some; I can’t remember them off the top of my head. Throughout working on the book, we had an ongoing word document of just insane origin concepts.

(laughs) I’d love to see that.

JR: I don’t even know if I have it anymore (laughs). We used to work together, and we’d entertain ourselves by sending emails back and forth by basically trying to make each other laugh, and a lot of them came out of that.

I like the acronym origin a lot, because when I was a little kid, or maybe before I was even born, some of the old stuff I’d read would use the acronyms. They were always the most absurd, people would just try to plug anything into these letters, so I’m a big fan of that kind of nonsense.

It always seemed like they’d come up with the word first, and then try and make it work from there.

JR: Yeah (laughs).

I really liked in Afrodisiac the RO comes from Robot.

JR: (laughs) They’d pull that trick a lot.

I think SHIELD has changed what their acronym stands for a couple of times.

Oh I’m sure they have. They have this new book out from Jonathan Hickman and I’m not even sure it means anything at this point.

JR: Right. They’d probably be further ahead to drop the acronym part at some point.

I guess it makes sense on its own. But still, it is funny they change it all of the time

I really want to see that document. It sounds awesome.

JR: All the most interesting ones are in the book.

Was there anything, not origin related, that didn’t make the cut in Afrodisiac?

JR: We have one more that I like enough that we’ll probably, maybe try. But it will be its own book, and it always would have been its own book because it wouldn’t have fit in.

One of the things we approach the character with was the idea of character, like icon type characters. People think of character in writing as like “oh that’s a well rounded character” or you’ll hear a person call a character three dimensional or two dimensional if its full of stereotypes and cliché.

But I think with comics we’ve entered an area of licensed property, intellectual property, where a character becomes something besides a literary character. Like Batman, if you were to compile, and they have as Chip Kidd has put together Superman and Batman books. You get to see “this is Superman in 1938” and “this is Superman in a television serial from the 1950’s” and you see all of these different versions of Superman. And it’s not about “oh, that’s a believable character”, it’s more like we all have a version of Superman in our head. We make the character real and three dimensional and fleshed out, not by he’s well written and we understand his motivation but by “oh, I had a toy of him when I was a kid or saw the cartoon or someone else saw the movie” and it becomes this idea that millions of people have a slightly different image of him in their head.

That was kind of how we approached the character with Afrodisiac. That was kind of the character we wanted to create. It wasn’t so much that “this is a role model” or “this is a character study”, this is a character of the equivalent of Batman and Spider-Man.

That’s very interesting. Especially like you mentioned Batman, I remember hearing people in line talking about how they were stoked for the movie but they thought the comics were stupid.

JR: Right.

It’s that type of thing that…it’s very interesting.

JR: It’s a strange phenomenon. How do you separate the cartoon from the comic from the movie from the 60’s TV show? It’s all Batman. It’s either stupid or it’s not stupid.

So much is dependent on time. One of our writers did this write up on the history of Batman and about his demeanor and how much he could handle as a hero is dependent on what point of history we’re looking at. During Grant Morrison’s JLA run, they made it seem like he could take out anyone if he had five minutes and a socket wrench.

JR: Right (laughs). That’s a different version of Batman.

Back in the 40’s, he could shoot someone but he couldn’t do much of anything in terms of detective work. It’s interesting how those things factor into a character.

JR: They really build…each contributor seems to apply a very small piece of it. If you were thinking of it as a computer image, all of the creators are putting one or two pixels in and what emerges is this multi-faceted icon, rather than a literary character.

The Afrodisiac’s enemies include Dracula, a giant cockroach, a lame super villain with lesbian henchwomen, the Devil, Hercules, a nefarious computer, and Richard Nixon. What was it about these characters that seemed to make them natural enemies to Afrodisiac?

JR: You know, I don’t know. There’s a lot about Afrodisiac that I’m not sure about. Decisions that we made that I’m not sure why we made them. Some of those characters maybe made sense for the story at the time, there’s such a variety of reasons. The monster story I just wanted to do a monster story, it was more about drawing a car running into a monster. That’s as deep as the idea started.

I think Nixon…I think Brian wrote Nixon in. I can’t remember how he got involved. We tried and tried to get a good Vietnam story going, but we never quite did and that had a lot of Nixon involvement. We work fairly organically. There are some stories I pretty much come up with where Brian may tweak and vice versa, and there are stories where we’re combining three or four ideas that we may have. So, there’s no one easy answer. We don’t have a formula.

No, I didn’t expect it to be…it was all over the place enough I just assumed it came up organically when you were developing it.

JR: It’s such a weird thing. The brainstorming back and forth, what spawns an idea. You come up with Dracula and all of a sudden it makes perfect sense because Dracula has so many parallels to Afrodisiac. He has these women under his control; ostensibly he’s this sexy character. There’s just a lot there. As soon as an idea like that comes up, you think, yeah, those two are a perfect match.

I think I realized that it was more organic creation rather than trying to make this happen when I saw Afroduck.

JR: (laughs) Yeah, that was one that works better as a cover than as a story. (laughs) We had story ideas for that, and there’s certainly 70’s precedent for Howard the Duck and funny animal comics and things like that, where it almost works but we just couldn’t quite make it work as a story but as a cover that’s one of my favorite things in the book.

I think I mentioned in my email that I was flying down from Alaska when I was reading it, and I was laughing so hard when I saw Afroduck. The flight attendant actually came by and asked me what I was reading and I showed it to her, and she laughed and walked away.

JR: That’s really funny. (laughs) I often go for walks and I’ll be listening to comedy albums, and you can always judge them by…you know if I’m walking down the street laughing and I don’t want to be laughing, in that environment I don’t want to be laughing, but that’s sort of the quality of the album if I can’t help myself.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I do that at my desk and I’ll be listening to Patton Oswalt and all of a sudden I’ll be rolling laughing as my boss is like “what is wrong with him?”

JR: (laughs) I’ve had days like that before. I used to listen to the Ricky Gervais radio show, and it’d get to the point where I’d have to shut it off. (laughs) I used to work in a cube, and you know, you’re just making noise trying to stifle laughs.

Next thing you know you get the reputation as the awkward, constantly laughing person. It’s fun though, I like it. I’m glad I’m not the only person who does that.

Artistically speaking, there is a wide range of styles in the book, especially when it comes to the covers in between stories. How did you decide to rotate styles and which to choose?

JR: Some of them kind of lend themselves…I feel like I don’t really have a given style. Like, Mike Mignola’s a great example of a guy who has a style. You can pick his work out from a mile away…it wouldn’t matter if he was drawing a chair or Batman and you can tell it’s him. I kind of envy those people, but it just hasn’t happened for me. As a result, I tend to bounce around and try to match styles to subject matter. I try to achieve some sort of effectiveness through the style, like sometimes it’s more cross hatched and textural, gritty realistic, sometimes it’s more cartoony and simplified.

It’s a story by story basis on how I’ll approach it. Especially with covers, occasionally there will be an homage. Like the Medusa…there’s a panel that is Medusa in Afrodisiac, and that one was sort of an homage to Neal Adams. I think of Neal Adams as the 70’s cartoonist in terms of dominant, influential style.

I think there’s a lot to be said…I like artists like you that can switch styles based on subject matter. It works. Even your work on The Guild shows that, just being able to switch style in the real world and in the game.

JR: A lot of that credit really should go to the colorist. He does A LOT to make that effective.

This question is extremely random. If they set up a decathalon for pimps, with contests including things like “strongest backhand”, “smoothest voice” and “pimp strut”, who would win: Shaft, Black Dynamite, or Afrodisiac?

JR: Well, Shaft would come in third, because he’s not a pimp. He’s tough, but he’s not a pimp.

I would have to say, boy that’s tough (laughs)…that’d be quite the showdown. It’d be a classic, you’d see it on ESPN Classic.

I would love to see that.

JR: I’m going to give the nod to Afrodisiac. Any event with street in the title he’s going to win.

I’m pretty sure our comments will include accusations of you being a homer in this case.

That’s a joke.

JR: (laughs)

I agree though. I just started watching Black Dynamite last night to prepare for this interview in all the ways I possibly could. Just like I was listening to Curtis Mayfield as I was preparing for it.

JR: What’d you think of Black Dynamite?

The little I got into, it’s really hilarious but I think to a certain degree a little bit can go a long way.

JR: That’s interesting.

But it’s just nice to see Michael Jai White being a badass.

JR: I thought there were some really good parts in that.

Now that Afrodisiac is wrapped up, what’s next for you and Brian?

JR: I don’t know. We’ve been talking about different things, but we’re not working on anything actively. We’ve done a couple of US Ape strips, but that character isn’t quite fully developed yet. I have another Afrodisiac story I’d like to do…maybe that’s it. I don’t know.

I’ve just come off a busy year, so I’m…I finished up the Guild maybe a week and a half ago, and I’m going through some illustration jobs that are piling up and I’m in the middle of…I have four shows I’m doing that are like two weeks apart (laughs).

That’s fun.

JR: You do a show for a weekend, then that’s maybe three or four days out of your schedule, and work for a couple days and try to get back on track and do another show. So I haven’t had a chance to really sit down and think what our next big work is going to be.

Let’s say, you’re in a dream scenario where you could work in whatever world with whatever characters you could get your hands on, and there would be no editorial control. In this fantastical make believe land, who would it be?

JR: We wrote a script for The Punisher vs. Galactus.

Oh my god (laughter).

JR: We actually wrote the script so that’s one where if we had total freedom I’d like to see it done, but not bad enough to do it for free.

This is already the greatest comic I’ve ever heard of. (laughter)

JR: I’m surprised Marvel hasn’t done that already.

I’m surprised also. They did The Punisher vs. The Marvel Universe with Garth Ennis, but, I’d love to see that. That’d be a hell of a thing.

JR: Other than that, I have no idea.

Back to Digital Comics, but what’s your opinion on Digital Comics, and do you think they’ll ever outright replace print?

JR: They’ll replace print, and they maybe already have in terms of being a disposable medium.

The original comic book was a format based on cheapness and it was always a commercial form, and I’m not sure if print really is commercial anymore. So in that way digital distribution has already replaced print. Like it may not have achieved commercial status yet, but I think the print side has already lost that commercial status.

That’s not to say that print will go away, it’s just a shift. I think you could make the argument that video games have kind of ascended to the commercial narrative medium of our time.

I’d agree with that. I grew up thinking Final Fantasy games were the best movies I’d ever seen.

JR: The thing about print…I think print is becoming a more expressive medium. So people who are choosing print and to put their work into print need to think what the ramifications of that are. I think a lot of people don’t consider that and think “I like to read comic books therefore I want to print my work as a comic book.”

And that’s okay, that’s a decision too, but I think you should be aware of all of this. Everything you do as a creator is an active decision. If you don’t consider that act, you’re probably not taking advantage of its potential.

I think a lot of creators, especially now, are taking advantage of the digital comics boom. I mean, this years Eisner category for Digital Comics is absurdly talented. You’ve got Karl Kerschl, Cameron Stewart, Jeremy Love…just a lot of really talented people working in digital comics these days. I think people are doing that but I do think there are still the people who think “I’m going to do a comic for Marvel and that will be the pinnacle of everything.”

JR: I think that point of view has changed a lot in the last ten or fifteen years. That’s a good thing.

You mean the Marvel perspective or the Digital Comic one?

JR: The perspective that I want to be a cartoonist but Marvel is no longer the top of my aspirations. I don’t mean me personally, I mean in general. I think there are a ton of people who make comics now who may never have read a Marvel comic. I think that’s fantastic for the medium.

I agree. I have friends who I’ve loaned a lot of books to that have never read a Marvel comic but have read Blankets or Laika by Nick Abadzis, and things like that. It’s easier to hand a book like that to a random friend of mine than an issue of The Avengers.

JR: There are generations now that have grown up on things like SPX that table at SPX, and you see their work and realize their influences aren’t Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and John Buscema, but Brian Ralph, Peter Bagge, or the Hernandez Brothers or something like that, and then you have the whole anime/manga generation…it’s amazing. It’s so great as a comic reader.

The medium is in such a transition from commercial to…I guess acceptable art form. I heard second hand one of the bigger publishers that there is more talent now than can be published, and I thought that was really telling.

The great thing is, there probably is more talent now than can be published in print and through traditional channels, but there isn’t more talent than can be published and distributed digitally. I think if you’re just interested in great comics, there are more great comics than there ever has been, and it’s probably going to continue to expand and to grow relatively quickly because there are so many young, talented cartoonists who didn’t grow up with the boundaries. I don’t know how old you are but I’m 33, and whenever I started reading comics there was still a stigma against comics. Kids are being illiterate or whatever, and if you’re 20 or 18 right now, you probably never really experienced that.

It’s pretty exciting.