The nudist comics of Reinder Dijkuis

A peek at the diverse and expressive world of Reinder Dijkuis’s nudist webcomics

Reinder Dijkuis is the prolific creator of Greyfriar’s Isle, a webcomic about a nudist camp run by a small family, along with several other titles including Tess Durban and the Lives of X!Gloop. His longest-running and best-known comic is Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan, which ran from 1992 to 2017.  Working in a variety of styles and genres, Reinder’s work is lively and expressive, a great example of the flexibility that good cartooning can provide. While working with so many different subjects, nudity is fairly common in Reinder’s comics, often featured quite prominently.

Greyfriar’s Isle is my personal favorite, having a fun sitcom feel to it and a large cast of characters to bounce around with. I’m also fond of the Heavy Metal vibes of Tess Durban, without all the more exploitative elements common in the comics published by that magazine. No matter which of his comics you decide to read, Reinder draws his characters and their settings in a cool, energetic way that is always appealing, and it’s all worth taking a look at. I was really thrilled to get the chance to interview Reinder a little bit about his art and I hope you enjoy reading it. 🚀

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Interview with Reinder Dijkuis

Looking at your different webcomics, nudity is a big element regardless of genre. The Lives of X!Gloop is sci-fi, Tess Durban dabbles in fantasy, and Greyfriar’s Isle feels like a sitcom. You truly showcase how nudist media doesn’t have to be limited to any particular style or genre. It feels like each title is part of a bigger, shared, clothing optional universe too. Was this the plan from the beginning?

The beginning was a long time ago! Before I became a naturist. There wasn’t really a big plan; it’s just how my brain works. I like to put little easter eggs in my comics for people to discover, and that means that cameos from other comics appear all the time, including comics by others and by myself. So some variant of X!Gloop has appeared in each of my comics, sometimes in substantial roles, sometimes less so; Tess shows up in Greyfriar’s Isle, and the kids from Greyfriar’s Isle have shown up in Tess Durban even though they canonically don't live in the same town. So there’s no master plan, but it results in a nudity-tolerant shared universe anyway. Though in most of that, nudity still attracts notice and attention, so I wouldn’t call it clothing-optional.

You mention on your site that Greyfriar’s Isle is inspired by a real-life island you frequently visited as a child. Were those visits your introduction to nudism? What set you on the path of making comics on the subject?

I wish I could say that, but I wasn’t a naturist at the time, and neither were my parents. So, for example, the bit where 75% of the beach on Greyfriar’s Isle is clothing-optional but the good bits that you can actually easily get to as a tourist aren’t is based on what I learned about the real-world island of Schiermonnikoog (“Grey Monk’s Island”, roughly) much, much later.

I’d been wanting to swim, sunbathe, and generally spend more time nude for a few years since my late teens, and I’d always drawn nude characters, but while I read up on the concept of naturism through places like the rec.nude newsgroup on Usenet, I didn’t really muster the courage to take the plunge until I was in my mid-twenties. I was visiting a friend, and we were hanging out on his balcony when we spotted the downstairs neighbors sunbathing nude in their yard. My friend was a bit scandalized; I was like, “They look like they’re having a great time,” so the next day, I went to a public lakeside beach on the other side of my hometown that was clothing-optional. 

I’ve found that stories like that are very common, that many people don’t dare to get into social nudity or don’t have the means, which is why I sympathize with people who are nudists at home only, even though I think they’re missing out. So that’s affected my desire to promote naturism through comics like Greyfriar’s Isle and generally more relaxed attitudes to nudity in my other comics. It took me a while to actually make a real nudist comic, though. I first tried it shortly after my initial lake beach visit, but the seeds of Greyfriar’s Isle itself weren’t planted until 20 years later, when I started thinking more about the island setting. 

I expect I will eventually do a home nudist storyline one way or the other.

Between the different webcomics, and seeing your name pop up when I was reading through Grace Crowley’s nudist webcomics, it seems like you’ve been a pretty prolific artist for quite a while now. How have you kept up working on so many titles over the years? How do you think your work has changed over time?

I’m just a very obsessed person, but even so many of my comics have ended up on long hiatuses. Lately, I’ve had less energy, and even the two comics that are still ongoing, Tess Durban and Greyfriars Isle, are going very slowly. On the other hand, I’m doing many more separate illustrations than I used to, and I like to think they’re a little better than they used to be. 

My interests have changed. Coming up with ideas for scripts has become much easier, and I always have more than I can draw myself now, so I have to be more selective. I’ve also become more interested in the environments that the comics are set in, the environmental storytelling part of making comics. For example, I’m putting more real-world locations into Tess Durban, and the new Greyfriar’s Isle comic that I’m working on prominently features the interior of a house, different back and front yards, and the street outside. 

Generally, I like to think I put more effort into drawing well. Sometimes in the past, I’d be more concerned with publishing three times a week or more and that would sometimes lead to the quality of the art going downhill. 

I loved the musical festival arc in Greyfriar’s Isle and the darkwave band being a big part of Tess Durban, and read that you’re a musician as well. Do you find a lot of overlap between visual art like comics and the music you make? Do you prefer one over the other?

Strangely, the music-making side of things is almost completely separate from the comics. I’d like to someday make theme songs for the comics and I’ve tried to write the songs that appeared in Greyfriar’s Isle during the festival arc, but I never got very far. The closest I got was writing more words for the Trousersnake song “(I’ve Been Thinking) Long and Hard About You” which was just stringing double entendres together. But I couldn’t come up with any music to fit that. Generally I find making music harder than comics and after this year’s February Album Writing Month, I’ve fallen off the habit hard.

I think comics are one of the best mediums through which nudism and its ideals can be expressed to a larger audience. What aspect of nudity do you really want more people to understand through your work?

This is going to sound very clichéd but it’s that nudity is just a state of not having any clothes on and that it’s liberating, practical and comfortable but not necessarily a sexy or sexual thing (though it's not bad if it is). That depends on the context in which you’re nude. So that’s not a new idea, but I agree that you can promote that in comics very effectively, especially if you have a cartoony style that puts it more in the realm of representing ideas. 

Oh, and I also try to get the idea across that it’s for everyone, that there isn’t one group that owns the concept of nudity. I don’t know if I’m successful at that yet, but I try to have as broad a representation of people as I can. There’s definitely still work to do in that regard as, for example, everyone I've included in the comic so far is (apparently) able-bodied, and I should do something about that.

I’ve been told you’re starting an all-new comic specifically for Planet Nude’s Strips. Could you tell us a little about it?

Actually, I’m doing what

Ahmed Raafat

is doing and taking my existing comic to Planet Nude. So it’s going to be Greyfriar’s Isle, taking off from where we left off at the website, in full-color and on a monthly schedule for now. There’s a natural break in the Heatwave storyline where I was getting a bit stuck, so this is an opportunity for me to skip forward a bit and take it from there. Here’s a logo-in-progress:

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