Adam Rust | Adam's Rust

Flak Magazine: Where do you work? And what do you do to pay the bills, other than your cartooning, if anything?

Adam Rust: I live in the city of Chicago. Other than cartooning, I teach a few art classes here and there, and then my main source of income is carpentry. And I sell a little bit of art, non-cartoon-related art, a couple times a year.

Flak: It's interesting that you do carpentry — most of the dudes who do cartooning that I've talked to are illustrators or IT-slash-knowledge workers. Is there sort of a draftsmanship element in common? What got you into carpentry?

AR: I had one of those dads who was always a do-it-himselfer, and also I lived in the country for most of my life, with barns and pet goats and llamas. It wasn't really a farm, but it had a lot of outdoor pets and tractors and whatever else. So I hated the idea of working for somebody else, an office job. I had one, for maybe a month or two, but since college I've been self-employed. It started out as landscaping and that type of thing, and then gradually I got more and more skills and now I'm just pretty much a carpenter. And I set my own hours. I work basically for myself and just do what I want to do. Plus, I was an art major in college, and basically it's art. It's problem solving and figuring out a way to make it look nice, work, and all that. It's a lot of fun. It can be really brutal sometimes too, but I actually like it a lot. And I can always sell my skills doing it, so I'll never go hungry. As long as I don't break both my legs or my neck or something like that.

Flak: About your strip, you don't really have a serial story or recurring characters, but you do parody the newspapers' fun activities page pretty relentlessly. Why is that such an appealing target for you?

AR: You know what, I never even really realized that I do it that often until you said that, but I guess I do. Honestly, I think a lot of it comes from Tom the Dancing Bug — I think Rueben Bolling is so smart, and he does a lot of that type of stuff, that parody of the activity pages. That's probably how it got into my brain. But I also found I can sell a lot of those things, and they just seem like a no-brainer because they sort of write themselves. I mean they're already there, and then all I have to do is plug in different whatevers — pop icons or whatever works for what I'm trying to do. And actually, there is a recurring character, Attila the Pun. He used to come up so often because when the strip started, it was all pun-related. It was just super easy, and I didn't have to think about it, and I could do one every night and it would be like some dumb pun. But now he's turned into his own little entity and he makes me giggle, just the idea of him.

Flak: Yeah, I think the more you know about how mind-blowingly evil the actual Attila the Hun was, the funnier the concept becomes. I was a history major so I'm clued into that and it totally cracks me up as well.

AR: Yeah, I like history too, so there you go.

Flak: So, I absolutely loved your two-part comic Boystown — could you kind of recap or explain that?

AR: Yeah, that really happened to me in Chicago as a graduate student. I had a craigslist ad posted that basically said, "I'm just trying to make some money, I'll help you do whatever you need done." So I get this response from this guy and he's in this big frantic frenzy for me to go up there and help him move a couple bookcases, like immediately. So I get there and right away something's fishy, because he gives me a different name from what he gave me on the email and the phone. But I was just like, whatever, I'll go in there and see what's going on. So he's showing me all his art — he's got a lot of art — and right away he's showing me stuff in the bedroom and eventually I'm just like OK, well where are these bookcases? So we get down to this den that's kind of disheveled, with boxes and stuff, and he shows me this bookcase that I have to empty and essentially move a couple feet to the left. So about five to ten minutes into this, me moving the bookcase, he asked me what I am. I'm like, "What do you mean?" and he goes, "Well, what are you, gay, straight, bi?" And I said "I'm straight, why?" And then he's like, "Well, why did you answer my ad?" And I go "Your ad? You answered my ad!" And then I could almost feel the wheels turning in his head, and a couple clicks later he just gives me this big "OOOOOhh." Apparently he had posted an ad on Craigslist — his partner had gone out of the town for the weekend and he was looking for a gay handyman to come over and have sex with him. Anyway I moved his bookcases for him, I took out his trash, and he wound up taking me out to a really fancy dinner. And when you're in grad school, you know, that means a lot. And he actually wound up giving me 40 bucks for moving the bookcases, too.

Flak: That's what I loved about that story. It's got that ending where it's just like, "Yeah, so then we went out to dinner. And he paid me for moving the bookcases." It has this intonation as if something horrible is going to happen, and then it's a very believable, low key, upbeat ending, and that completely cracked me up when I read it. It felt very true and autobiographical because it's hard to write that stuff.

AR: You can't make that stuff up. I actually wrote that for a book called Small Town/Big City put out by Young American Comics — it's out now. I haven't seen it yet, but that was why I decided to put it into the comic form to begin with. Every time I do one of those [autobiographical comics], I seem to get good responses. I think I'm gonna stick to that a little bit more.

Flak: I think you should listen to the feedback on that, because I totally enjoy your comic and I like your stuff, but that one really stuck out for me. I liked how it was very unadorned. I felt like you were just telling the straight story and it was a funny story. So many of these people in a creative position give in to the temptation to embellish this detail or embellish that detail or fix one thing so it feels more like a story and less like a weird incident, but this just felt real, which made it much funnier and much more interesting.

AR: Well I really do appreciate that feedback, it's hard when you're trying to make stuff like this and you get so little feedback. Every now and then, maybe an email from someone, but you never know what's gonna be good or bad.

Flak: Yeah, I think that's one of the really frustrating things for a lot of online cartoonists, this feeling that you're kind of working in a vacuum. And to some extent, I thought of Flak comics as a place where you can get a little more feedback — you can see what other people are doing that might be working or not working. So let me ask you a question about your development as a cartoonist, what got you started cartooning? Are there any particular people or things that were really strong, early influences for you?

AR: I can never figure out exactly what year it was, probably 99, I was in college in the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and reading their two independent papers ... I just thought the comics were horrible. They weren't funny, they weren't drawn well, and I don't mean to be such a jerk about it, but I kept thinking to myself, man, I could do better work than this stuff. So I drew up a few and I actually got rejected the first couple times, and then I sort of reformatted and got some advice from a friend of mine, and it started. It was a daily strip 5 days a week, one day a week with color, in the Badger Herald. I got like two dollars and fifty cents for a black and white and like five dollars for a color. So I did that until I graduated in 2001 or something, and immediately after that I started trying to get out there. The next publication to buy something was Hustler Magazine. And I guess as far as the influences go, it's obvious — well it's obvious to me — Mad Magazine. I do some freelance work for Mad, I'm working on something right now in fact. And I mentioned Ruben Bolling earlier, Tom the Dancing Bug, which is huge. But as a kid I was obsessed with the Sunday funnies, and I actually pasted them up all over my walls and I saved them all and I read Mad and Cracked and all that stuff. Anyway, since then I've been trying to make the comic smarter and stronger, so I've been getting into these multi-panel things and I'm sort of starting to figure it out. This is almost a decade into the making, and I'm just starting to feel like I'm getting in my groove. So it's a process man, it takes a long time.

Flak: What's your take on the state of newspaper comics, are they basically dead or do you see people reinventing them in a productive way?

AR: I don't know. I'll tell you what though, I had a small relationship with a guy at Universal Press Syndicate while I was still at The Herald, and basically what he told me then, and every now and then when I hear from him, is that newspapers aren't willing to make a change. Even after Charles Shulz died, they still ran the Peanuts Classics, I mean that to me is like what? Come on. Right there is a perfect opportunity for a young cartoonist to have a spot, but they won't even give that up. And even that Family Circus guy, I think his kids do that now. I mean they have their favorites, they have what they want, and they're just so unwilling to make any changes at all. I guess they're just afraid of offending people, of losing a reader because he wants to see what Marmaduke's up to that day or something. I hardly ever read them anymore, and I was someone who was obsessed with newspaper comics. I think if you want something more cutting edge, you've gotta turn towards the Internet, and that's what people do.

Flak: Yeah, it seems like every time a paper considers dropping a comic, they have to turn out a big referendum and then four or five people actually call the paper and that freaks them out and they just don't have the balls to go through with it. And that's why Hagar the Horrible is still running, or like you said, Marmaduke. Anyway, do you have any bigger, sort of long term projects that you're walking on or toward? Anything coming down the pike that we should know about?

AR: The only thing I'm really working on is getting more page time in Mad, that's kind of my — honestly, I can't think of a publication I'd want to be in more. I'm honored that they bought a few things from me in the last couple years, and I hope to keep that relationship going. But in addition to that, I would like to get my own collection out there. It's a lot of work and that's not an excuse; that's something I definitely want to do whether I put it out myself or whatever. Other than that, I'll hopefully get some more money, hopefully do less carpentry and more cartooning. We'll see. Ideally, that's all I want to do — draw comics and make some art. But how realistic is that? — Not very.