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Steve Nease
Editorial cartoonist, creator of PUD
Steve
Nease is an editorial cartoonist, his work is a staple in well over a
dozen publications in Canada, including The Brampton
Guardian.
“I got into cartooning by sheer accident,” Steve Nease said back in 1999. “I’d graduated from university and was desperately looking for a job- any kind of job.”
One of his first jobs was a freelance photographer for The Vaughan Courier.
But, in 1978, Steve Nease was hired by The Oakville
Journal Record, which later merged with The
Oakville Beaver, as a staff artist. He remains there to today, now
the art director for the paper.
Remarkably, Steve is mostly self taught. “In school, I didn’t find art classes too stimulating.” he said.
Steve’s political cartoons hang on the walls of people such as Prime Minister Paul Martin, former Ontario Premier Mike Harris, and Hockey Night in Canada broadcaster Don Cherry.
About Pud
In 1984, his career fully established, Nease looked around for more creative venture. It wasn’t necessary to look farther than his own family.
"Like a writer, an artist should draw about what he knows." Nease said. "Ideas and inspiration were all around me."
Thus
was born Pud, a comic strip about the hilarious on goings of Nease’s real
life family- with a little artistic license
employed too of course. The recurring characters are sons Max, Ben (Pud),
Sam, and Robert. The family dog is another, as well as himself and his
wife.
The strip runs in many papers within the Metroland chain, monthly in City Parent Toronto, and weekly in the Saturday Globe and Mail.
Where'd he get the name "Pud" from?
As a kid, Steve loved the Lionel Barrymore movie "On Borrowed Time". When he had a child named Ben, he started calling him "Pud", after the child in the film.
In the 1980s, he did an editorial cartoon about how children flock to advertisements. The editorial was illustrated in two panels, and received great response from readers and newspaper co-workers.
He decided to do up some more samples, which he showed the editor. The editor decided he could use extra content to fill up the space on the editorial page, and the strip's been going strong since.
At the time the strip started Fleer had stopped putting their "Fleer Funnies starring Pud" strip in the Dubble Bubble gum packages. He decided he could safely name the strip after this character, without confusion. Four years later, the comics in the gum packages restarted.
He says he's considered renaming the strip, and has a title that he's batted around in his mind, but he's just never got around to it.