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Contact the Artist
Read the Exclusive Rudy Park Interview
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) of Darrin Bell and Theron Heir |
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 Q. Who is Rudy Park?
A. Rudy Park is the name of a manager of a cafe, the House of Java Cybercafe. Rudy is an optimistic, sometimes overzealous, consumer. He is a believer in the healing powers of technology. He is a man eager to solve all of life's problems the old-fashioned way: by purchasing an enormous television.
Q. Where do your ideas come from?
A. Theron: Just this morning, I picked up the paper and there was a story about a new marketing concept being considered by the UPN television network. The idea is to make logos for advertisers visible during the actual programming. The story immediately sparked a handful of thoughts about how marketing is further encroaching into every corner of our existence. The reason I bring it up is to illustrate that, for me, the bases for ideas are everywhere. Every morning I pick up the newspaper to find seeds for a handful, and sometimes more, ideas about the absurdities, contradictions and curiosities of modern life. That's when things get horrible. In a word, the problem is in the execution. The trick is to translate that idea not just into something funny that is in keeping with the style of the strip, but also that is fundamentally original. What I mean is, I often find that cartoonists (and lots of others) who profess to do social commentary identify similar trends. For instance, many satirists might take a crack at the storyline of people waiting in line for weeks for the next Star Wars movie. The challenge for me is to put some twist on the story that goes beyond merely identifying the issue and avoids the cliche. I remember a Doonesbury series many years ago, written at the time artificial hearts were coming into the public consciousness. Trudeau wrote about implanting the heart of a liberal into an ailing conservative to create a moderate. He found a hilarious and creative way to address an issue on everyone's minds. Of course, he's a master, and I a wee grasshopper. But this, I believe, is the essence of our craft, when performed at the highest levels.
Darrin: Visually, I find ideas all around me. Everything is grist for the mill. I get a lot of inspiration from the great sitcoms of the past few decades (M*A*S*H, Good Times, All in the Family, Cosby, Rhoda, and Seinfeld, mostly). Each of those had different approaches to staging and blocking, but all of them had one thing in common: they had archetypal characters square off against each other in most of the scenes. There was a lot of visual and emotional conflict, and it made the scenes electric. Classic Warner Bros. animation is also inspiring. If you were to shade over all the details until you're left with just a silhouette of the characters, you'd still be able to follow the story. The characters each had distinct shapes, which, again presented you with a lot of contrast. Finally, there's my friends and family, some of whom think my characters look just a bit too much like them. I expect to lose a few friends over the course of the strip.
Q. Where do the ideas for the characters come from?
A. Theron: The main characters mostly were born from amalgams of friends and acquaintances. But once the outer shell was created, we morphed them substantially to fit a chemistry we wanted to achieve and to tried to avoid creating caricatures. The exception is Mrs. Cohen. We have no idea where the irascible old bag came from, but she makes us laugh. We have no control over her and eventually expect her to take us all over and to someday rule the planet Earth. We do have very strong ideas about the characters' weaknesses and strengths, and about how they might evolve.
Darrin: One thing about Mrs. Cohen, this character began as a commentary on the Y2K craze, back in 1999. She was so convinced the world was about to descend into anarchy that she had a bunker built in her front yard, and asked Rudy to deliver 2,500 ham and brie on pumpernickel. At first we thought her attitude might change when the scare was over, but it seems like Mrs. Cohen carries a bunker around with her wherever she goes. She refuses to conform to our strip. She dictates what direction her character will go, and often returns our scripts through our windows, attached to a brick.
Q. How did the strip originate?
A. From Theron's perspective: About five years ago, I had an idea for a strip about the emerging technology-centric world and the New Economy. The trouble was, I am the world's most horrible artist (not only can I not draw a stick figure, I can barely draw a stick). I picked up an editorial cartoon written and drawn by Darrin Bell. I gave him a call, we met, and we clicked immediately. Our senses of humor are dead on, our influences similar, and we both have excellent table manners. We come from different backgrounds, so we provide different sensibilities, but we both seem to have a lot of respect for each other's perspectives (either that, or he's faking his respect really well). Before long, the strip became a shared vision in tone, style and content.
We spent about 2 years developing a daily strip, which was under a development deal with Universal Press Syndicate. Ultimately, the syndicate passed on the strip. This was a damn good thing. We really hadn't figured out our characters or voice, or decided on any t-shirt styles. But this all evolved in the next two years, during which we published a Sunday-only strip. The strip's underlying themes struck a chord with a number of magazine and newspaper publishers. But the secret to getting the strip published had equally to do with two critical business realities, and we can't impress these enough upon aspiring cartoonists (or other creative types). One reality is that the market was ravenous for any content. This was the height of the dot-com boom and tons of publications were looking for something, seemingly anything, to fill their pages and Web sites. We capitalized on this. And this leads to the second key reality: we are good sales people. We were unabashed at approaching people and pitching the strip. We made cold calls, we approached friends and acquaintances who had friends and acquaintances at publications. This is not to say we were slimy or obnoxious or overly aggressive. But we felt we had something worth showing to people and we made an effort to show it to them. We wound up making a comfortable amount of pocket change.
Along the way, we had sent the strip to United Media. We didn't have much hope of ever being syndicated, but one day about 18 months ago, they called out of the blue. They put us under development for nearly a year. It was a rigorous year in which the strip evolved a great deal. But in January it paid off when the syndicate said it wanted to syndicate the strip. One reason that they bit, I think, is that as we wrote more, we honed in on a voice. The characters evolved. We realized the strip would be much less explicitly about technology, etc. and much more about characters, life in the modern age, politics, social influences, corporatization in short, everything under the sun. The "cutting-edge" elements of the strip helped sell it (both by us to the syndicate, and by the syndicate to newspapers) but what makes it sustainable is that it's about characters and, from a plot perspective, about everything. This is not different from just about any other strip, or TV sitcom, or drama out there.
Darrin: I was in my 58th year of college at U.C. Berkeley, where I'd made a (small) name for myself as the editorial cartoonist for the student paper, the Daily Californian. I'd also been freelancing my editorial work to the LA Times and a few SF Bay Area newspapers for just over a year. I was working on a comic strip of my own called "Lemont Brown." The strip covered a vastly different subject (incidentally, that comic strip is currently in development with United). It was nowhere near ready for syndication, so I was content to flesh it out over the next few years in the student paper and on the Internet (where it was one of the first "Web comics") before submitting it to the syndicates.
Around that time, I got a phone call from "Theron," who'd seen one of my editorial cartoons, and wanted to know if I could try converting my style for use in a comic strip he'd been tinkering with. I showed him "Lemont Brown" on the Web, he liked the style, I liked his writing, so we met and agreed to work on Rudy.
We immediately landed a development deal with Universal Press, where, with some helpful guidance from Lee Salem, we discovered we didn't know what the hell we were doing. We were focusing more on the high concepts involved in the technology revolution than on the characters, and that's always a fatal mistake. Characters are what comics readers fall in love with, not concepts. Luckily, Universal chose to pass on the strip.
Q. What are your work habits? Do you create on a daily basis? Do you work in morning or at night?
A. Theron: My work habits are largely proscribed because I have a "day" job. I get up early and work on the strip for a few hours. Is this ideal? I don't know. I don't have another choice at this point?. What I do know is that I need to keep thinking about the strip on a daily basis. Otherwise, I tend to find that I literally forget about who the characters are, and what the tone of the strip is. Some days I sit down to write and and say to myself, okay, self, it's time to start writing my melancholy novel about the battle of Stalingrad. Then I know I've been away too long.
Darrin: Some cartoonists can whip out 6 finished strips per day. I'm nowhere close to that. I'm a perfectionist, which isn't to say I get anything perfect. All it means is, I love to take my time savoring every line, every brush stroke, and every letter of dialogue.
Because of this, if I didn't regiment the act of creation, I'd fall hopelessly behind. I have a pretty strict schedule that I try to keep to, especially since Rudy Park isn't my only cartoon. Monday is spent drawing the borders, ruling the lines, and writing the text for an entire week of "Rudy Park," a couple for "Lemont Brown," and one for "Maynard," a comic strip I produce for CIO Magazine. I like to do this in the morning because this part of the creation is tedious, and I need to tackle it fresh from a good night's sleep. The next day is spent blocking the scenes-drawing stick figures for each character, then fleshing them out a little into blocky shapes and making sure my perspective is correct. Wednesdays, I pencil in the details, turning the shapes into actual characters. It really helps to do that part the next day because it gives me a chance to look at the blocking with fresh eyes and improve it if possible. Then I ink the Sunday strip.
Thursday, I ink the dailies and color the Sunday strip. Friday, I scan everything in, clean them up in Photoshop, and upload them to the syndicate. Weekends I try (and often fail) to do nothing work-related. In the meantime, whenever I have time, I write down ideas for my other strips, "Lemont Brown" and "Maynard," and I maintain the Websites.
Perhaps most importantly, I make time each day to spend an hour or two at the gym or take a long, long walk. It's a way to recharge the batteries and stay healthy, since cartoonists, almost as a rule, spend several hours sitting each day.
Q. How long have you been writing/cartooning/drawing?
A. Theron: I never dreamed of being a "writer". When I was younger, I think I liked to do things I was good at and I had some proficiency at expression, written and verbal. Also, I had more than a few things I wanted to get off my chest. (Thanks probably to the nefarious influences of politically active parents, I always had views on a lot of issues). Another key influence is that as a kid, I read pretty voraciously. Along the way, I would periodically sit down and clumsily try to emulate the styles of certain authors (early flails included attempts to imitate Robert Ludlum and Douglas Adams). I collected Doonesbury, but didn't realize Trudeau was boring his way into my brain, secretly encouraging me to try to combine humor, writing and political/social commentary. I plan to sue him at some point for leading me astray from law school. Over the years, teachers and employers gave me encouragement for my writing. But it wasn't until I became far less responsive! to their feedback, and more re sponsive to a voice/style/subject matter that appealed to me, that I started to write anything that mattered to me. Truth be told, I still don't consider myself a "writer" It's among the things I do, but not what I am, whatever that means.
Darrin: As a child, I was easily bored. My mother would take my brother and me along with her wherever she went: the DMV, college, shopping, the laundromat. We couldn't afford toys, so she always brought along paper, crayons, markers and pencils so that I'd have something to do, some way to entertain myself. I began drawing at the age of three because I felt I had nothing better to do. Once I was old enough to read, I began pillaging my older brother's comic book collection. At first I thumbed through them for the art alone, but after a while, the text started to seep into my consciousness. I began to appreciate the interplay between caption, dialogue balloon, and art. Around that time, we started subscribing to a local newspaper, and I immediately fell in love with the comics section and the editorial cartoons. I was captivated by the power of sequential art to elicit a whole range of emotion, from unbridled laughter to unexpected tears.
A comic strip I found in that paper, "Rose is Rose" by Pat Brady, was especially important to me. Times were very tough back then, and that strip's innocence and hopefulness helped me put things into perspective. Cartoonists are at their best when they can make you laugh, when they can teach you something without preaching, and when they can make you proud -or at least glad- to be a part of this irrational, mixed-up, unfair, dynamic world we live in.
That's what I wanted to do with my life and, on good days, that will hopefully show up in the work.
Q. Who were the cartoonists that most influenced you?
A. Theron: Trudeau, Breathed, Steve Martin, Woody Allen, Rick Chandler, the Isle of Man.
Darrin: Watterson, Larson, Schulz, Breathed, Greenberg, and Paul Conrad, the famous Nixon-Reagan era LA Times cartoonist.
Q. How would you describe your style?
A. Theron: I hope it speaks for itself. The idea, at least, is to be satirical but with a narrative underpinning. We aren't just making a commentary about parts of our lives, we're trying to tell an evolving narrative about our characters. Also, cubism.
Darrin: Abstract impressionist, with almost as much breasts as Picasso.
Q. What do you hope to achieve with the strip?
A. The very first thing, and the most important thing, is that we want the strip to be funny. When people read the strip over breakfast, we want them to laugh. If they're eating cereal, we want them to giggle so hard that milk will run out of their nose. If they're not eating cereal, the milk-nose thing may be tough to achieve, but we will remain optimistic.
We also want people to think about modern life. Rudy's lifestyle-- his obsession with buying the latest gadgets, keeping pace with the latest trends, and wearing the latest clothes -- ultimately leaves him unsatisfied. We hope readers agree. We want to reinforce the idea that there is more to life than amassing wealth, buying huge cars, sacrificing long-term satisfaction for short-term gain. At the risk of sounding trite, the strip is about values.
Lastly, we want to make money -- gobs and gobs of it. We want to become filthy, stinking rich. Then we want to spend our newfound wealth on new gadgets, on keeping up with the latest trends, and on enormous televisions.
Adds Darrin: I want to end world hunger, cure disease, be a uniterer, not a dividerer. Short of that, we want to make people laugh just enough that they'll be willing to listen to what we have to say.
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