Chins vs Beards

Rudy Rauben has lived and died a few lives, from the sound of it. In a previous incarnation he once served as art director, graphic designer or illustrator for a variety of magazines, including Dragon, Amazing Stories, and Reality Hackers. You may have seen some his of illustrations in collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering or the H.P. Lovercraft inspired Mythos.

This time around Rudy is back with a new graphic novel called The Medicine Show, and another one in the works. He first contacted me out of interest for Mythos Media, we got to talking, and quickly realized we actually had quite a lot to discuss. I’m going to be sharing some of those conversations with you, wherein we touch on everything from the I Ching, internal Kung fu and the artistic process to bizarre times at Reality Hackers and experiences working for TSR and Wizards of the Coast.

JC: To start… I’m interested in hearing more about your current comic project, and your past history as an artist.

RR: As my current project is based more closely upon my actual experiences (than The Medicine Show), I can kill two birds with one stone here, to some degree…

Here’s the skeletal version:

For better or for worse, I grew up near the home town of Dungeons & Dragons. It was just starting to get popular when I was in high school. Being a very rebellious, artistic teen, in a religiously conservative family and rural area, I soon fell in with the gaming community that the burgeoning D&D business was attracting nearby. I ended up working at TSR (D&D’s parent company) for a number of years, moving through the ranks, finally ending up as the art director of the magazine section.

At first it was great. The environment was very creative. My mentors were these laid back ol’ veteran newspaper men or beatniks with great record collections. One of my earliest jobs was to send out back issue orders and keep the LP record changer stacked and running! The offices were in an old, broken-down Victorian. Got to learn the tricks of the trade from artists and editors who had much more hands on experience and training than I, and I just sucked that up like a dry sponge. The atmosphere was so very congenial. It really spoiled me.

As D&D became more popular TSR became more corporate. Eventually, our nice little publication staff was required to leave the Victorian hide-away and move into the corporate HQ with the suits. We all were stuffed into this windowless, industrial cubicle-land and subjected to the suit’s BS management tactics du jour — all your typical corporate horror stories basically. Rot set in.

That almost gave me a nervous breakdown: increasing stress and workloads, fewer then eventually no carrots, lay-off anxiety driving horrific morale all around almost every day for months and then even years at a time… I was still quite young and had little capacity to place it all in context.

About this time I made the acquaintance of a guy (pen named Dr. Mabuse) who happened to be a writer for this Berkeley, CA magazine called Reality Hackers. We hit it off immediately. We were into similar things: Robert Anton Wilson, Peter Tosh, Church of the Subgenius, boho wackiness in general. As it turned out, this kind of thing was par for the course with Reality Hackers as well, and they happened to be minus an art director. By then I was so sick to death of D&D-land: I just bolted for Berkeley with “Dr. Mabuse,” to take the job, never really looking back or bothering to make sure that the contracts were in order.

So, at Reality Hackers (which later became Mondo 2000, after I had already left) I met Queen Mu, R.U. Sirius and St. Jude (the pseudonyms we routinely employed). Leary, Wilson, McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake and John Lilly were kind of routine fixtures of that scene, along with plenty of hackers, crackers, artists, hippies, anarchists, punks, occultists, swingers, Silicon Valley overspill, and designer drugs. The list of robust characters was endless. It was a tremendous amount of fun, creatively very stimulating, and I really loved the people I was working with. I became close friends with the notorious hacker grrrl-nerd St. Jude. She had great taste in comics by the way, turned me on to a lot of great indy comix stuff… poor little Errata Stigmata…

But eventually I ran afoul of Queen Mu (the publisher of Reality Hackers). First impression: she seemed to be this kind of brainy, psychedelic hippy hostess who espoused these very egalitarian ethics, but that later proved not to be the case, at least not when push came to shove with me. R.U. Sirius was the heart and soul of the magazine, but ultimately it seemed as though he had to defer to her, I guess ‘cause she held the purse strings or something. She kind of sold me a bill of goods, and I bought it hook, line and sinker. R.U. Sirius tried his best to compensate me for the resulting disparity, but there was only so much he could do without jeopardizing the magazine’s financing. Later, Sirius and St. Jude would fall out with Queen Mu, but I was long gone by then. I wasn’t there all that long, when all was said and done, but they sure were tumultuous times.

Because the housing Queen Mu had promised me (to compensate for a lower salary set against a much higher cost of living) never materialized I ended up bunking with this peculiar computer programmer/hacker who I knew through Reality Hackers, another of their writers. I’ll just call him “Max.” Now Max had a rather elaborate resume, very little of which anyone seemed to be able to substantiate. I’m still not exactly sure what parts are fact and which fiction.

He was adept with computer programming, that was about all that was certain. Max basically claimed to be on the run from the NSA. In his teens he had supposedly been caught hacking into sensitive military/intelligence databases. As a result he had been forced to work for the spooks or suffer the consequences. The spooks gave him specialized training: he acted like he was Jason Bourne or something. Once operational, he began crafting and planting computer viruses in foreign nations’ computer systems for the spooks, but then used similar viruses to blackmail his way out of spook service. Or so he said.

Max cruised along “revealing” bits and pieces of this sorted story, and that certainly gave him a certain cache that this nerdy young man would not otherwise have had. Strange people were always just across the street watching him. The easy answer would be to say it was all just BS crafted by a troubled personality to get attention. He tended to be “Mr. Knowitall,” loved to hold forth, play at celebrity. The thing is I did repeatedly witness Max being visited by a man who others in the Berkeley scene identified as a Naval Intelligence officer who had been shopping at the local “alchemists’” pharmacies. The plot thickens. Whenever Max got a visit from this guy he was left swimming in cold, hard cash. Max was rather blaise about it all: yeah the guy was a spook, and yeah, he was designing viruses for him. Okay…

My savings were almost nil when one day I woke up to find Max sitting at the foot of my bed in lotus position, staring at me with way too much grim, unblinking aplomb. “Hey, how are you doing… what are you doing?” I ask. Max says to me, and he didn’t seem to be joking, “oh I’ve just been sitting here for the last few hours considering how any day when I find that I haven’t killed my roommate while he slept, so that I could observe the Rorschach pattern his splattering brains would create on the wall behind his bed, is a good day, I guess.” Okay… this is really psycho freak show time now…

That episode was just the beginning. I suppose it may have had something to do with me trying to explain to him that people were comparing notes on things he had said and claims he had made, and thereby he was loosing credibility: people were discovering that he had said one thing to one person and then contradictory things to another. I tried to suggest to him that he might want to chill out and stop playing so fast and loose with the truth. Dead cold silence was his only response, and ongoing, brooding iciness thereafter. I was trying to be helpful, but he may have either seen me as the instigator of his undoing or just decided to shoot the messenger in frustration.

Around that scene the idea of there being baseline “truth” or “reality” was terribly out of fashion. Reality was generally considered to be wholly malleable (so personal ethics were similarly malleable)… I think it is our perceptions of reality that are malleable, but this is not to say that there is no baseline reality at all, you know?

Yes…

And Max loved to play with guns. He was endlessly reading pulp fantasy and sci-fi novels, like one or more a day, most days. He seriously claimed to me a Zen master as well as professional shaman, ninja and gambler (all at around 22 years old). Pathetic boy-man or seriously dangerous? My guts told me there was something seriously wrong there, I just wasn’t sure what the threat level might actually be. Queen Mu and I were at each other’s throats as well, so I just decided to split that scene before something tragic happened.

I wandered down through Arizona and worked odd jobs for a while, eventually started freelancing illustration again. Illustrated a lot of RPGs, some science fiction journals and various junk. The pay usually sucked. Tried working in comics a few times, but the pay was even worse– truly laughable.

Eventually the whole collectible card thing took off. Did many, many of those: On The Edge, Everway, Mythos, and Magic the Gathering most notably. The Magic illustrations paid better than usual, so that made getting by a bit easier than it had been since going freelance.

The art directors were decent and respectful, there was a good deal of creative freedom, and they were attempting to freshen up the tired old sword and sorcery themes.

When Hasbro bought out WotC that scene quickly went to hell. The game was more popular and profitable than ever, but commissions and royalties were nonetheless cut. My art directors became increasingly demoralized. The creative freedom soon evaporated along with the multi-ethnic, cross-gender themes.

Marketing, toy and product tie-ins began to directly encumber the creative process. I began to feel like I couldn’t generate any sincere inspiration with all the awkward logistics that became involved. After a year or so of that continually worsening I just decided I needed a break from it. But then I never went back. Just couldn’t. Got my bearings back, finally, and they were markedly in a different direction.

So much so, and coupled to a brutal divorce, I shaved my head, renounced my vanity, legally changed my name and just wandered off.

I had been doing comix on the side for quite a few years already, and I finally decided “all right already, time I put my money where my mouth is here and give the comix priority– that’s what I feel genuine inspiration for, I need to be true to that.” I mean, my muse had been increasingly peevish with me for some time about this.

That brings us up into fairly recent history.

I’ve had a similar experience in my way, in terms of hitting a breaking point, dropping everything, shaving my head, and disappearing, right down to the nasty divorce- but I’m not sure I was really walking away from quite so much. My “fame” only extends to very small circles at this point… Back then, even less.

I hardly consider what notoriety I had much wider. And yours seems like a more accurate reflection of the artistic concerns we seem to share. Anyway, that which we call a bull thistle by any other name would smell…

I still remember that day’s message via the I Ching:

“He lends grace to the beard on his chin: Regards form (the beard) being treated as more important than content (the chin on which the beard grows).”

In my case it was amusing, and occasionally slightly disturbing to see how marketing was cooking most of this minor fame up. It‘s rather ingenious how that gets done, with the bigger collectible card operations, for instance. The slightly disturbing aspect is how some folks actually start to take that ersatz PR/marketing-generated “star power” seriously when they’re given a moment in the spotlight… but hey, it’s the cult of celebrity that most of modern society and commerce bows down to, I guess. Me, I’m thinking of Hokusai, or Sun Luc Tang…thinking how much more there is to learn and do, no time to rest on laurels, especially plastic ones. Or I’m thinking “what would Joe Strummer say?” It just embarrasses me.

So to get back to your initial question… Part of my current project draws upon some of the characters and scenarios of these circumstances, particularly the Berkeley experiences. Subtexts having do do with the I Ching, internal Kung fu and lucid dreaming are also involved– inner and outer dimensions kind of riffing on one another. I’ll likely be exploring how Leary’s and McKenna’s ideas about human “mutation” or “transformation” stack up against those of people like Chuang Tzu,  Jiddu Krishnamurti and David Bohm. The protagonist’s understanding is gradually developed, through various circumstances and encounters, in a way that’s roughly analogous to my own. You know how it goes: elements from multiple actual people get conflated into single characters, the names get changed to protect the innocent, banal events get downplayed or omitted, history is jiggled, and your dakini gets to take on flesh and walk the pages so Her otherwise unseen influence can be made visible to others.

I know exactly how that goes, yes… it’s the same process I’ve been following for as long as I can remember… For better or worse.

My contacting you initially was prompted by reading that interview with you on Reality Sandwich. I was impressed with your take on art and myth; it very much parallels where my own head is at these days, and for seemingly similar reasons…

I’m happy you did. I’ve been reading The Medicine Show… it has the added benefit of fitting in surprisingly well to the general cosmology we created for some of our other Mythos Media projects… How do you look at the world building and literary aspect of it?

In the past, I’ve tended to relate to my comix more like poetry than prose. As such, I’m surprisingly content with they way The Medicine Show turned out. But this next comix project is looking less allegorical. I’m referencing experiences I’ve actually had more directly now, so it’s likely to be more contemporary and naturalistic in that way.

Nonetheless, as the Medicine Show‘s underlying “cosmology” is basically expanded upon in this current project, I’d certainly be curious to hear more about your take on this tree we both, apparently, seem to be barking up.

For instance, this “agent” business, which seems to come up a lot in your work: Privately I’ve been employing the term “agents of evolution” for quite a few years now, never realizing others were also using it in a similar context – for this whole loose, elusive, subterranean current of people conscientiously

working, each in their own way, with their own resources and talents, to somehow evolve the conditions on this planet. That seems synchronous with the notion of “wayfarers” or “wanderers” (found in classical Taoist literature): having to find your own path, steadfastly go your own way, and thereby organically and psychically improving the conditions for the whole environment, naturally. These “agents” are an unfolding element in my current project.

That’s kind of eerie, actually. It is one of those things I never really bothered to fully explain because I don’t think it can be fully explained- you kind of either get it, or you don’t. And we definitely seem to be coming from a similar corner on these things… Which is, quite frankly, pretty rare.

Generally I just stand clear, keep my mouth shut and observe; but in your case the affinities seem pronounced enough that I feel as if I would somehow be doing them a disservice if I was to remain too circumspect.

I tend to think it occurs when people start to really tap into their own creative voice, be they be a visual artist, writer, musician, yogi or yogini, martial artist, weekend gardener, parent, small child or whatever; everybody can drink at this “well,” whether their conscious of it or not. There is always the creative, inspired option in Life. I mean, that is how it unfolded for me– it started with the Zen-like experience of learning how to let inspirationcome through unimpeded.

It is like there is this instinctive impetus coming through that so many of us are feeling. We each cloth that in our own way, but the underlying signal seems to be basically the same. We’re not just fantasizing, this isn’t escapist, there is some serious mojo percolating up. It’s the “mysterious pass”– it’s wuji –it’s the pregnant void– it’s lotus blossom floating on the pond of our minds. You don’t know exactly where that insight or inspiration emerged from, but that doesn’t diminish its vitality or cogency.

It tends to be very personal, meaningful and developmental, even if that doesn’t necessarily communicate to others so readily.

Stay tuned. Tomorrow we will run the second half of this interview, where we go deeper into discussion about the philosophies and practices lurking beneath the artwork.