MB: Most artists tell me that when they were children they were into very clean art and it's only later in life that they developed affection for the looser stuff.

RD: I took a dislike to anything that was too clean. I wasn't keen on American comics because they were too slick. Most of my favourite artists worked on the war books, Battle Picture Library and stuff like that. People like Victor De La Fuente and Gino D'Antonio. This was all stuff that was reprinted from the1960s, but I didn't know it at the time. It was the first time that I'd seen it. They had these great, flourishing art styles where everything was very expressive.

Again, De La Fuente was where Cam Kennedy got his style of drawing and when I first saw Cam's work, I thought that it was the same bloke.

A homage to Sgt Rock by Rufus: "Sgt Rock being one of my favourite songs, and comics.. Joe Kubert is such a huge influence.. in both his art, work ethic, and just as a gentleman.. He embodies all I love about others."

I also particularly liked the American war comics like Our Army at War and Sergeant Rock and stuff. People like Joe Kubert but also a lot of Phillipino artists like Gerry Talaoc, who used to draw The Unknown Soldier. He was amazing. He drew these really bandy-looking people and used loose, scribbly lines. It was beautiful. Lots of blacks. I loved that. I thought that it was an absolutely beautiful style.

MB: Can you see a through line from those guys into your own stuff?

RD: I very much want to draw like that, but it's very difficult to have that sort of expressive style. I think that like almost everyone else who's worked for 2000AD, Carlos [Ezquerra] was just this guiding light. His art in Battle Picture Weekly was really dynamic and when he coloured his strips he used really crazy primary colours. It was just on fire. And many of the other artists who were working on it were older artists from the ‘50s and ‘60s, who were less dynamic. Their stuff was very solid, but just didn't have that energy.

I remember when I first read 2000AD as a little kid I was blown away by it, because there were artists like Mick McMahon, Brett Ewins and Brendan McCarthy and all of this really dynamic stuff that was different.

MB: The sort of art that reaches out off the page and almost pulls you in.

RD: For me, it was absolutely, completely seductive. I lived and breathed 2000AD and not much else. I was a 2000AD bore. I was absolutely obsessed with it.

I can remember visiting Forbidden Planet in Denmark Street in London as a child and they had some 2000AD art up on the walls and Dave Gibbon's Doctor Who art and one of the great revelations for me, was… up until then when I made a mistake I used to rip up my work and start again. And I saw the pages from Doctor Who and I could see where he'd made a few minor corrections. It was like, "Wow, if Dave Gibbons can make a mistake and fix it, maybe I can as well."

MB: It was a peek behind the scenes.

RD: Up until then, as a child, looking at the printed page, it could seem quite impenetrable. You can't see where people have made mistakes or changed their mind. When I saw a piece of original artwork for the first time I could see where he'd rubbed out a line and, you know, drawn a different facial expression. It didn't quite catch the mood, so he'd redrawn the mouth.

Just seeing the fact that he'd edited himself was such a revelation for me, because I kind of thought that these artists were so good that they just sat down and drew the pages first go. It quite a relief to find out that even the best would make mistakes.

MB: You realised that Dave Gibbons was human and not a robot.

MB: He's one of those ‘I'll make it look easy' merchants...

RD: Very much. A very effortless style. During the 1980s he shared a studio with Mick McMahon in St Albans. He was working on Rogue Trooper and Mick was working on Dredd and Slaine and Ro-Busters and everything. They were a great ying and yang to each other. I think they really helped and influenced each other. They were doing a lot of experimenting; stuff like inking the blacks in first and then putting the lines in afterwards.

I think that particular period where they worked together in studio they did some of their most outstanding work, because they really bounced off each other.

MB: Are McMahon and Gibbons the antithesis of each other in terms of their working methods?

RD: I think that Dave is pretty methodical in that he's got a very workmanlike approach in that you just sit down and you draw it. Whereas Mick will work over 50 or 60 different angles and often draw two, three, four, five or six versions of the same thing, trying to find what he considers to be the perfect one. So, although a lot of readers thought that Mick had a scrappy style, that's why he's so highly considered by so many artists because there's so much design work going on in there.

Him and people like Kevin O'Neill, there's a lot as an artist that you can feed off. You're not looking at the finished line particularly. You're looking at how he's constructed things. There are no right angles and everything's slightly skew-whiff. All the characters are at slightly odd angles, which is really cinema-graphic. It feels like a photograph catching a moment, as opposed to a staged piece, which is a much more old-fashioned way of doing things. You know, you have the guy in the centre of the panel and it's very staid.

Like I said, with Carlos's work, and Mick and Kevin carried this on, there was this very dynamic style. Dave had a much more Marvel style.

MB: But you came round to that clean-line style?

The opening page of Tank Girl #14 by Rufus.

MB: When did you start trying to draw comic strips?

RD: As soon as I started trying to draw I drew little boxes copying comic books. I used to make up my own adverts, you know, with Judge Dredd advertising Coca-Cola. One-page strips where'd he'd shoot the perps and have a coke. (Laughter) He'd look to the reader and go, "Yes, I fight crime with Coca-Cola."

Right from the get-go, I was trying to draw comics. I was just obsessed with them. Whenever we had a history project or something, we were supposed to write essays. I'd write a few paragraphs and then I'd turn mine into a comic book.

My teachers were, thankfully, rather lenient about this and still marked my work. There was always a high proportion of graphic content in work that I produced. I like drawing more than anything else.

MB: It sounds like you had a lot of encouragement in your attempts to make art.

RD: I was very, very fortunate. I didn't end up going straight into comic books. I ended up going sideways into animation, which kind of happened by accident. I tried for a job because I needed some work. I did that for years. I've never been a huge animation fan, but I did it and thankfully was ok at it. I continually had work and worked for a lot of big studios like Warner Bros and worked on a lot of big stuff, like the film Space Jam with Bugs Bunny.

Judge Death by Rufus Dayglo

MB: Was that a useful experience?

RD: For me, it was an incredible experience. Although I didn't enjoy a lot of the work because I had to draw things like the Nesquik Bunny, Snap, Crackle and Pop, and Tony the Tiger, it gave me the discipline to sit down and work for 12 to 15 hours a day. Now, I've come back round to doing what I want to do, which is comics, I sit there and I do work, because when you're working at home on your own, it's really easy to get distracted. You could spend weeks reorganising your sock or your CD collection if you wanted to.

I think that it's very important to have discipline and I think a lot of freelancers struggle with that. I was lucky with that. I worked for a studio and we were paid what's called footage, where you get paid for how many frames you draw. You learn to work very quickly and you also learn to make very quick decisions and just get on with stuff.

It didn't matter if every picture wasn't perfect, it was about telling the story. And I think that's a very good lesson for comics because a lot of people who try to get into comics will spend six months preparing two or three-page samples, when really what they should try and do is set themselves up a working rhythm so that they can actually crack through a whole bunch of samples. That'll mean you can actually get the work done and learn from your mistakes, whereas if you agonise over two or three pages, if you haven't got them right to begin with, then you're really just polishing a turd.

MB: People should try and get in a position where someone will pay them to draw and not be too precious.

MB: How many have you had?

MB: Did you go to the States because of the lack of room in 2000AD? 

RD: Not at all. It happened purely by chance and good luck really. I was doing some work for 2000AD and I had a dialogue with Australian artist, Ashley Wood, where we emailed each other a lot. He works in the States for IDW Comics and he invited me to do a story for a book called Doomed, which was a horror magazine from IDW. I had a very short time to turn the story round in so I got the story done very quickly. A week to do 16 pages or something.

I had a full-time job at the time, so I was doing it after work so I was doing something like two pages every evening. I had to really pare it down and get it done. It ended up being a great learning curve for me because I suddenly realised that if I try not to worry too much about the work I can get it done.

IDW liked that art and off the back of that they offered me some work with them. I was going to be doing some licensed comics. They had me lined up to work on a couple of properties. Then, over that Christmas 2005, Ashley rang me up and asked me if I could help him with Metal Gear Solid by doing layouts for him. I couldn't believe my luck because he's such a great artist and I couldn't understand why he'd want my help, but I, of course, said yes.

Off the back of that, we then worked on the Tank Girl project and I've had other stuff like Snaked and the new Tank Girl, and a whole bunch of other stuff with Alan Martin. But it was really down to the fact that Ashley took such an interest in my work and he opened up a lot of doors for me. I've got a lot to thank him for.

MB: He's a great artist.

MB: Do you enjoy collaboration and how much do you find yourself learning?

MB: It's learning by doing again.

RD: For many years, when I was working in animation because it was quite difficult to get away because it was a regular wage, I would work on fanzines. I did lots of band flyers, did them for Creamfield. It was about getting my work out there, but there was also a practical element, in that I was keeping my artistic hand in.

I think that people need to... if you do want to make a go of drawing professionally... you need to make sure that you're working with other people, because it's pretty rare that you're going to be working on your own and doing everything yourself. In fact, those artists who do work entirely on their own, often have twenty years in Marvel Comics or something first, where you're part of the machinery. They were part of the process and once they'd absorbed that process, they then went to work on their own.

MB: People that you might think of as auteurs. Miller, Mignola…

RD: Mignola is a great case in point. He was a journeyman artist for many years at Marvel, whose work didn't look that great and all of a sudden he suddenly changed styles.

MB: Lots of lessons here... draw, draw, draw...

RD: -- and concentrate on storytelling. Drawing is important, but it's more important to communicate the story.

Your job as the artist is to make sure that you're making the story as clear as possible, and that you're not just drawing a pretty picture. What happened in ‘90s, particularly with things like Image Comics, is the drawing became more important than the story, so that you had lots of splash panels and no narrative. Although that's very pretty for an issue or two, it makes for a very boring read. That's why those stories haven't stood the test of time and a lot of those techniques have fallen by the wayside. They were pretty flabby.

If you look back, the art that has really stood the test of time, it's people like Alex Raymond or Alex Toth. A lot of those 1940s and '50s artists, Milt Caniff, all those guys. They were solid storytellers. They had a minimal style with lots of solid black and whites, but it was all about storytelling. Even people like Dan Decarlo, who did Archie comics. That's all about storytelling. They use a pared-down style and it's all about what the characters are doing.

And that's what I think I learned from animation, which was concentrate on a character's essence. Bear in mind what they look like, but, more importantly, what they do and how they do it. Judge Dredd stands in a different way than Aimee Nixon from Low Life. They're different people so they have different body language. If you look at a photograph of a soldier standing next to some civilians, the soldier will stand in one particular way, defensive or offensive or as a figure of authority, whereas the civilians will stand more naturally or perhaps be scared. You have to look at body language. It's your job to convey that.

MB: When you talk about that, it's interesting. You say don't be precious, be quick, don't be afraid of making mistakes. But when you describe the artist's job, it sounds very daunting and that there's a lot of responsibility for the story.

RD: Trying to turn a script into a comic strip, it's like you're making a little movie. Your job as the comic book artist... it's a bit like you're watching your favourite DVD and you're freeze-framing the best frames and picking them out, and putting them on the page. And that's what you're doing in your head, you're trying to pick the best camera angles for the story, revealing something about the character, moving things forward and being dynamic…it's so much fun.

Inks for a Judge Dredd Megazine cover by Rufus

My ambitions as a kid were that I wanted to draw John Wagner Dredd, which I got to do. I've never been so happy. I did it over Christmas. I was filling in while Origins [a Dredd mega-epic] took a break and, again, it was a very quick turnaround because it was quite last minute. It was so exciting. I was sitting there, reading a John Wagner script that no one else had seen before and I got to turn it into a comic strip. I was so happy. I was working 16 hours a day, but I was very happy.

MB: Is John Wagner's spared-down style the style of script that you enjoy working on as an artist?

RD: It's very nice having a script that gives you room to move. That's the nice thing about Alan Martin's scripts. He is also an incredibly accommodating writer. He's not dissimilar to John Wagner. He just tells you what the character is saying, gives you a very brief description of what they're doing and where they are, but leaves the rest up to you. He'll set you up with a visual reference or something. He'll use pop culture references. But he gives you a lot of scope to play with. It gives you a very panoramic feel, because it makes you feel like you've got a huge playground to run around in.

If a writer is overly descriptive because there are some writers who really want it done exactly the way they see it in their head...

MB: ... Control freaks?

RD: It can just be a bit suffocating.  You have to kind of edit their descriptions, to have it make sense. If you have a writer that tells you what Judge Dredd is doing, where's he standing, what he's looking at, what's on the ground, if there's bubblegum on the wall, all that sort of stuff, then it's very nice and descriptive and it's a bit like a novel. But it's not a novel, it's not doing anything to move the story on for me.

It can be quite confusing for an artist when they sit down with a script and there's too much description. I know a lot of other artists do this as well and what you do is go through the script with a red pencil and cross out all the stuff that's extraneous. I know that writers will be horrified to hear that, but that's why quite often they go, "Ah, it's nothing like I gave them in the script." They've been overly descriptive.

MB: I've heard that you can tell a lot about the action on the page from the characters' dialogue if the writer's good.

RD: Absolutely. That's the thing about Alan Martin's stuff. The characters have such distinct voices. You know when you have the Simpsons on TV and you can not be looking at the television, but you can see in their head what they're doing by what they're saying. It should be like a good radio play. You can see the action in your head.

That's why I don't think it matters if you have a John Wagner or an Alan Moore script. It's not about a particular style. It's about if the writer captures the characters. It's my job as well, to represent those characters. Judge Dredd has stood up so well for so long because he's such a distinct character. Also, he plays off really well against the canvas that is the city. He's a tuning fork for the environment.

John Wagner's pared that down so well that he can capture that mood quite quickly. That's why some of the other writers have trouble doing that. It's almost like they can't hear the same pitch and so they do a pastiche of it.

MB: John Wagner comes across as quite humble.

RD: He's very... when I did the strip for him, I sent him the artwork to make sure he was ok with it. The last thing I wanted was for it to be published and for it to turn out that I'd misread the script or something or just misinterpreted something. He wrote me back an email thanking me for sending it, because he said that most people don't bother. He's so utterly approachable and he's a very nice guy, although I don't think that he particularly wants to talk about Judge Dredd. He's had that conversation. He's very generous with his time.

Like I said, he was one of my absolute heroes as a kid. He wrote so many of my favourite stories. He wrote for Battle, strips like Darkie's Mob, all the stuff that I loved as a kid. The artist who did that, Mike Western, was one of my heroes as well, an absolute genius artist.

John is a generous person to work. He gives you so much scope in the script. It's a very generous thing for a writer to do. I feel that some of the writers that over-describe things don't trust the artist. It was really nice to know, as well, that he'd liked what I'd done.

I've ended up working on not one, but two of my favourite things. Judge Dredd and Tank Girl. I didn't think that I would be working on Tank Girl. I introduced Ashley Wood to Alan Martin, because Alan needed someone to draw Tank Girl. I didn't even put myself forward or anything.

MB: Tank Girl is a favourite strip then?

RD: I think that particularly when I was a teenager and I saw Tank Girl, it was a huge inspiration. It was such a breath of fresh air and the art style was so fantastic as well. Like everyone else on the planet, I loved Jamie [Hewlett]'s work and I just thought that Alan's stories were hilarious as well. I'm a huge fan of much of the same music as him. He's a big pop culture fanatic and he loves stuff like The Goodies. All of the little things that he was referencing, it was great, the jokes they were making. It was like been invited to a great party every issue. It was such a shame that it ran out of steam in the mid-‘90s.

When I got in touch with Alan Martin and he said that he was looking for an artist, and it needed to be someone that Jamie would be ok with drawing it, I suggested a few people, one of who was Ashley Wood, because he draws such amazing women. And Ashley is good at machinery as well. So Tank Girl, you know. Ashley was just so perfect for Tank Girl because he's a very dynamic artist and his style is so different from Jamie's that we felt that it would be really exciting to see what he did with it.

He started working on the new Tank Girl mini-series, The Gifting, and I think, basically, that he had deadline problems. He very kindly asked me if I'd come on board and help, and it was great fun. Off the back of that, Alan asked me if I would work on some other projects. It's kind of gone full steam ahead from there.

MB: Has Alan got his old magic back?

RD: I think Alan has stepped away from the character and he's come back to it, and he's done some really good stuff. He's doing some very, very funny stuff. On a number of occasions I've spat tea out on myself reading the stories because they're so out there and funny. He does some great stuff...and he's one of the few writers who can write women really well and what I particularly like drawing Tank Girl is that all the primary characters are women, Tank Girl, Barney and Jet Girl. They form the hub of what it's about, which is why I love things like Love and Rockets. It's about the women and the men in their lives are always secondary.

That's why I liked working on Low Life as well because it's about Aimee Nixon. When I was asked if I'd like to do a Low Life, my first thought was, "Oh no, I hope that it's not Dirty Frank." Simon Coleby and Henry Flint have covered that so well, I'm not sure there's that much that I could bring to Dirty Frank. I probably would have run a mile. The idea of doing Aimee Nixon, who has been absent from Low Life, was quite appealing. A chance to do something different.

MB: As well as female characters, would you like to see more female creators getting into the Meg' and 2000AD?

RD: I think it's extremely odd that there aren't more women involved in comics. One of the things that I'm really thrilled about right now is that, because there's been an explosion of manga, at comic shows now not only are there loads of teenagers and kids, which there weren't five years ago, but there's also loads of girls turning up. It's fantastic.

I went to the Hi-Ex show in Inverness, which was a great show because it was very community-based, and there were loads of girls there with fanzines and magazines that they'd put together themselves. We get loads of girls turning up at 2D in Derry, too. Again, it's very community-based. And the ones who seem to really put their heads down and do some work are the women. It's wonderful. It's very refreshing.

I very much hope that these girls will stick with it and in the future we'll see more female voices in British comics. It's such a great medium and there are so many comics now that seem to be aimed at girls. If you go into Forbidden Planet in the West End there's a whole manga stand full of this stuff for girls and women. And they're buying it. I want to read stuff that is from a different perspective from mine, because so much of what's out there is by people who have a similar outlook to me.

MB: Could it save the industry in this country? Things have been rough for a while …

RD: People keep saying that, but everyone that I know is busy. A couple of years ago, yeah, a lot of my friends were really stressing out and things seemed to really be on a downturn. I talk to everyone now and they're all busy.

There's so much more self-published stuff as well and it's so professional. It's moved on so much from when I did fanzines. They were black and white and we were sticking things together ourselves. I mean they were pretty amateur. But now, they're just as professional as any other magazine you can pick up on the newsstand. And the people who are doing them are very dedicated.

I think as well, in the next few years, there'll probably be a big in-flux of Asian comics as well, because there's a big readership out there. Certainly, India seems to be one of the growth markets. And, back in Europe, there's a lot of first, second, third generation kids who might not be interested in something like Spider-Man, but might like something with more of a twist on their own culture.

For more on Rufus Dayglo, go to www.rufusdayglo.blogspot.com