Nexus: Baron v Rude
What the heck is going on with comics' number one hidden gem?
One of the best dollar bin comics of the past 30 years is Baron and Rude’s Nexus, a space opera wherein the titular character accepts massive cosmic power in exchange for executing the worst murderers and despots in the galaxy. It’s a concept with surprising depth: Driven to murder criminals by an external alien force, a troubled young man with cosmic powers must deal with misanthropy and the consequences of his actions in a universe desperate for justice and liberation.
The story blossomed into a bouquet of delightful characters presented in a wonderfully cosmic jardinière. It has comedy, drama, action and tenderness. There are certainly highs and lows across the run, but at over 110 issues, well…Pobody’s nerfect.
The Cartoonist Kayfabe lads turned me onto Nexus when they reviewed the Coming of Gourmando over-sized artists edition of the book. I was blown away by the painting and composition. A few eBay purchases later, I had the entire Nexus run collected for, probably around $1501. I blasted through it and loved every minute. It’s a fun and original comic. You can still find the Nexus omnibus books in the wild, but they cost almost as much as buying the single issues on Ebay.
The Coming of Gourmando was a daring experiment. Baron and Rude, nostalgic for lost Sundays mornings perusing the comics section, printed the entire series on broadsheets with each ‘newspaper’ having 8 pages of story. I have one of these and it’s brilliant. The art is huge and colorful. Each page a small chapter with a cliff-hanger much like the Spiderman weekly strips by my man, Alex Sauviak. The size and quality of the printing is truly impressive. I’ve considered framing it because it looks so nice2.
The over-sized artists edition of the book is equally dazzling and definitely a good point-of-entry for anyone interested in the series. The book is larger than life and the back half re-prints sketches, script, layouts and finishes to give the reader an impression of how much work it takes to create comics.
Comicsgate: The Gift That Keeps on Taking
Maybe you haven’t heard of Comicsgate. It flared up right around the start of Covid, so a lot of the drama was buried by other news. I cannot, in anyway, pretend to be an expert regarding what happened but I am extremely dubious of the Wikipedia entry. Last I checked there was a clear bias against the Comicsgate proponents. Yeah, I just looked again and the very first sentence calls it “an alt-right campaign against diversity. “ While I can’t defend the Comicsgate people outright, anytime I read “alt-right” I have an immediate and violent allergic reaction.
There are basically two camps:
(proponents) Comics have been ruined by over indulgence to a leftist ideology of diversity and inclusion that destroys existing characters (rather than making new ones), is boring and hateful toward the fans (see declining revenues across the board), and has replaced talented and experienced artists with inexperienced ideologues who are more interested in telling their stories than producing good product. It also reveals a clear ideological bias in the highest echelons of the publishing community.
(opponents) Comics have been the purview of old white dudes so long that every mainstream character is a boring cliche. The industry needs to diversify to reflect the modern audience. A large percentage of the target audience are women and minority groups, so it’s time to get them in the bullpens making stories for under-served audiences. Also, there can be no tolerance for ‘hateful’ ideologies.
I think I did a reasonable job of summarizing the best arguments without too much bias. But I’ll show my cards: I think the Comicsgate opponents (CO’s) are wrong, childish and ignorant while I think the Comicsgate proponents (CP’s) are obsessed with calling everything woke and everyone diversity hires. CO’s call their enemies racists homophobes and CP’s call their enemies Marxists and sex-pests. I’m sure you can imagine how well this is going.
The CO’s seem to have the momentum. They have effectively purged any writer or artist who isn’t fully on board with their agenda. They have mounted numerous whisper campaigns against long established and well-loved creators. The CP’s are on the back-foot trying to mount a counter-attack by ginning up new markets using Kickstarter and Indiegogo or their own imprints. One is trying to prove their point by purging the industry and the other by building a new one.
Why does Comicsgate matter? Well…if you haven’t noticed, just about every film and television project you’ve watched in the past 30 years came from a comic. Let’s say half so that I don’t have to do the work. Here’s a quick list of recent stuff from the top of my head (not including MCU/DCU films or Manga based anime):
American Born Chinese
Papergirls
DMZ
Y The Last Man
Dead Boy Detectives
The Sandman
The Boys
Term Life
Wanted
Invincible
Super Crooks
Watchmen
The Old Guard
the list goes on and on…The amount of heavy lifting comics are doing in modern mainstream entertainment cannot be overstated. Even the latest Dune films leaned on material from comics.34
The point is that even though comics are still mostly niche and readership and sales are declining, the power of comics in modern media has never been greater. This is so well understood that new comic series’ are written as dressed up storyboards with more hope placed on a potential option than selling issues.
Comicsgate, which initially appears like petty, low-stakes culture war, has had huge repercussions. A payout from a film studio on a creator’s characters and story would take them from destitution to set-for-life. Now these projects are never made or are modified beyond recognition. This is all downstream of the human cost which has resulted in numerous high-profile cancellations, retirements and even death.
What does this have to do with Nexus?
I don’t know the details of the Comicsgate timeline as it pertains to Mike Baron, but not so long ago he had a Kickstarter project banned because someone said it was racist5, so now he’s firmly entrenched. Detractors used their back-channels to intimidate Steve Rude and he, not even knowing what Comicsgate was, disavowed it and by extension is lifelong writing partner Mike Baron.
Needless to say, Baron is public enemy number one to his detractors and this became a problem for Steve Rude. It’s a terrible revelation to discover that all of your favorite comics creators live job-to-job. Any threat of not toeing the current ideological fad means never getting asked to do another paying gig. Rude himself has said that he can no longer afford to run his independent comic company “Rude Dude comics.”
Don’t hold your breath for the Nexus Animated series.
I’m not aware of anti-Comicsgate people or any left-leaning creators having their books banned or projects cancelled. There are definitely CP’s sniping back at CO’s and I’m sure fan boycotts must exist, but I don’t know of any projects being cancelled by crowdfunding organizations, media outlets or publishers for being too far-left. Please post in the comments if you know otherwise.
What we do know is these cancel campaigns are real, they are all back-channeled (i.e. the Whisper network ) and furtive (social media posts removed, anonymous calls to employers, private groups, etc.). The people who do this are convinced they are fighting bigotry and defending marginalized fans and creators while cynically clearing the table for their tribe. There’s no evidence this in-fighting has done anything except hurt the industry and its creators. It has salted the earth.
Nexus: Battle For ThuneWorld
I’ll start with Steve Rude’s Battle for Thuneworld.
The Kickstarter for this was messy and confusing. It went longer than other projects I’ve backed. I received a multiple copies of the Ashcan6 versions for some reason and then many months later, after the comics had already passed through my local shop, I got the full 5 issue series all at once. NBD, Kickstarters are always a bit random and I accept each campaign’s peccadilloes as part of the fun.
The comics look fine, they fit in the box with the rest of the series. The print quality is good, though it did feel like maybe the cover paper was a bit thin. I wish, however, I could be as forgiving with the reading experience.
My first critique: the format is too small. These pages were obviously intended for a large print format like the Gourmando newspapers. Each page is a stand alone chapter of the story and the composition reflects this. When printed 50% smaller, everything seems cramped. Characters lose detail, action blurs, word bubbles are cramped and tiny. It’s often difficult to suss out what is happening.
Furthermore, the story feels much longer than a normal comic. Sequences that might normally be compressed into a two or three page spread are now given their own page. Everything becomes a set piece and pacing it slow and disjointed. It is like reading a book filled with Sunday morning comics where the action drags because half of the story is reminding you what happened on the last page. I found it an absolute chore to read. Sadly, this is prior to my concerns with the overall story and plotting.
I’ve got to give Steve Rude credit. He’s not a terrible writer! He understands his universe and his characters. There is witty dialog and it even moves the story forward. He knows Nexus’ history and he’s so deft at visual story-telling he almost pulls it off. Unfortunately, there’s simply too much here and the story sags as a consequence. I’ve read far worse artist-written books and in comparison this is a ‘highly recommend.’ But when we compare it previous efforts, it doesn’t hold up.
I would recommend this book for Nexus collectors, Steve Rude fans and sci-fi nerds but I would suggest waiting for something reprinted in a larger format or getting a collected edition on the cheap. I truly hate to pan this book as it wasn’t terrible, but it just wasn’t good either and Nexus has a bit of a reputation to uphold.
Nexus: Scourge
This book was run as an Indiegogo compaign, though seems to also be a Kickstarter campaign. As part of the campaign I also grabbed, Nexus: Nefarious which was put out on Dark Horse. Scourge is on a new imprint by BIG Studios. I had a few issues with their campaign but was able to get everything resolved quickly, so props to them for seeming to care.
The very first thing you’re going to notice is the art. It’s phenomenal. precise, clean line art and a clear homage to overall style of the original Nexus books. It hurts to say, but I think I now prefer Kelsey Shannon to Steve Rude. I was unfamiliar with him prior to this book, but I’m completely on board—he’s clearly a master of the medium—and with Scourge it seems he was chomping at the bit to show what he could do.
Compared to Battle for Thuneworld, this is a far more conventional graphic novel. The story is tight, concise, hits the beats when it needs to and resolves where it began with the addition of a few new friends and allies. It is not a deep character exploration—nothing really changes—but it works as a brilliantly depicted episode of an epic space fantasy.
If a reader was merely curious about Nexus, this comic would be a great place to start. It’s beautiful, it reads well, it is tight and fun and the most likely of the two books to drive future readership.
Finally…
It’s interesting to compare these books. A split like this between creators is rare. Both are powerful and experienced storytellers with powerful visions for their creation. The differences between them reveal a lot about how the books are made. In this case, we see how much of a role Steve Rude had in creating the Nexus universe and the visual storytelling beats. Kelsey Shannon, while an amazing draughtsman, benefited from decades of pre-existing material.
Conversely, to the extent that Rude pulls off his first solo series, it reveals Mike Baron’s mastery as a comic book writer. Dialog, plotting and pacing are the writer’s key contributions. If they aren’t accomplished masterfully, even the best stories with the most amazing art will fail.
As a fan, I would prefer to see the original team working together on a single title that boosts Nexus’ profile and reboots interest in this wildly creative galactic playground. But as an artist, albeit a musician, I completely understand the need to shift away from old formulas that weren’t working. Nexus wasn’t going anywhere, interest is focused on the old fans and the few of us enamored enough with comics to learn the deep lore. As much as Baron and Rude love this series, they can’t force people to read it or publishers to publish.
Mike Baron’s approach of injecting new life with a new artists seems the most successful. It feels exciting. Rude’s book seems like what we’re used too yet it’s missing something crucial that made it fun to read. It’s hard to imagine Steve Rude finding a new writer to work with on Nexus and would likely just make the situation worse, but it’s not clear to me what Rude’s future is with this franchise. I wish Steve Rude the greatest of success, he seems like a hard-working, kind person with great ability. His great misfortune is being born in an era where the value of art is near zero7 and even a whiff of wrong-think can scuttle your career. Maybe his other loves, Space Ghost and Star Trek can provide new fields to furrow.
Other opinions:
https://www.thegutterreview.com/the-dude-abides-nexus-with-and-without-steve-rude/
The first few issues are the expensive ones, after that you can get big chunks of the run for under $1/issue
I do not usually like to hang original comic book art on my walls, I think it looks gauche and tacky.
I didn’t even get to video games.
I’m cautiously optimistic about this one: https://www.cinemablend.com/streaming-news/ed-brubakers-criminal-everything-we-know-amazon-comic-book-tv-show. Maybe this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Sonja_(2024_film), though it’s had its share culture war antics.
I read it. It wasn’t.
Ashcan comics are like demo tapes. They can be interesting in terms of how a comic project evolves, but are usually inferior reading experiences.
Yet the demand is sky-high…go figure