An Interview With Jim Rugg: Talking Street Angel, The Deadliest Girl Alive

There’s plenty to talk about when it comes to writer and artist Jim Rugg, including awesome art on books like The Plain Janes. However, more than 15 years ago, Rugg created Street Angel – a book featuring the deadliest girl alive. Since then, Jesse “Street Angel” Sanchez has had a multitude of outrageous adventures cementing her as a ninja-fighting badass, protector of the poor, and someone who could probably take on any superhero she wants. On the heels of her latest adventure, we talked with Rugg about everything Street Angel. Black Nerd Problems: You’ve been writing Street Angel for more than 15 years. She’s had several crazy adventures in this wacky world of ninjas, supervillains, and time travel. Now, Jesse is sort of an unconventional character for a superhero who can do all of these amazing things but lives in poverty. Where did this crazy idea for this character come from? Jim Rugg: Street Angel began as an act of defiance. I was bored with the new comics wall. It all seemed the same to me and I wasn’t interested. I’d end up buying back issues of Dirty Plotte. Dirty Plotte is one of my favorite comics, a black-and-white masterpiece from the 90s-00s by Julie Doucet. A complete collection of Dirty Plotte comes out this fall. So I was still into comics, but I was losing that new comic book day high.

Street Angel was the opposite of those comic books. Street Angel is homeless because that is the opposite of Batman’s billionaire alter-ego, Bruce Wayne. We wanted a differe…