I realize you’re real busy tracing lightboxing photocopying drawing comic books and all, but I’ve got a question. So I am looking at the Marvel solicits and I see a solicit for a new Black Widow series, and you’re doing the cover. So…
…since when is the Black Widow a double amputee? Is this going to be the result of Dark Reign? Is Norman Osborn going to chop off the Black Widow’s legs? (Or part of her legs.)
I mean, I’m all for inclusiveness, but doesn’t Silhouette of the former New Warriors fill the “handicapped superhero” niche?
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Freakier still are her breasts. Jesus, Land, have you ever seen an actual woman?
Real women, yes. Real breasts, no.
with those tits, i think no one will notice the legless part.
I could make a joke that the Black Widow was originally zipped up, but when Land realized he’d forgotten to draw anything below the knee, he exposed some skin to try and distract attention.
But of course, that assumes Greg Land might have been exercising restraint in the first place, and that is just a silly notion.
That’s what happens when you use perspective techniques from artists more dynamic than your own flat, mannequin style.
A student of the “Rob Liefeld School of Crappy Anatomy and Perspective”.
To steal a line from Freakazoid “Why won’t you die?”
I think she is just missing her right leg, just below the hip.
With the left, she’s just kicking her OWN ass, because no one else can do it.
And you just know, when a woman’s hooters effing EAT her clavicles, she’s one scary chick. Plus her hands are squids, her wrists are growing test tubes, and her hair can actually EAT whatever it is that might shooting out of her forearms.
@guayec:
I certainly didn’t, at first.
I know it misses the point of swinging the bat at the low hanging fruit that is Greg Land, but the cover makes me think of the “Trying to drive a supercar in Paris” segment of Top Gear that aired on BBC Amercia last week.
It’s comforting to know that so few artists suffer from a foot fetish. Maybe it was just assumed that no one was going to look above her neck or below her navel. I mean, at that angle the whole head seems to have been drawn on as an afterthought.
Stark, I think you’re half-right. I think this is traced from Liefeld.
It’s like photocopying a fingerpainting.
Godammit Greg Land. . . what is wrong with you ?
I used to think that just because I’m a little extra squeamish around blood and squelchy body parts and I have shaky hands and I don’t know much about brain parts except I like the phrase “medulla oblongata” a lot and I’m both a high school and a college drop-out, I probably could never be a neurosurgeon like I wanted to be back in 8th grade. But if dude man can be a well-known professional drawer guy who gets paid by a legitimate comic company when he can’t actually draw, like, all the pieces of a person at one time, then fuck it, I’m getting a scalpel and a big hammer and going into private practice.
I can forgive the idea that Land attempted to hide Black Widow’s calf and foot behind her left leg as it bent at the knee, but I simply can not find a reasonable excuse for whatever the hell happened to her right leg.
What purpose does having her jump serve, anyway? It’s not even a very dynamic jump. It’s an “action hop”, not very exciting. And the cover’s too damn generic anyway.
Cookie, that’s the thing. He CAN draw. I’ve never read his Nightwing run, but he drew a DC 1,000,000 issue I picked up at a flea market a few weeks back (it was Batman, but I don’t recall if it was Batman or Detective 1,000,000) and Land is a solid, if unspectacular, talent.
His “freehand” work shows depth, perspective, and flow, which is notably absent from the above. What he’s famous for now, of course, is the shortcut that became a crutch that became his signature: swiping images from whatever source available (movie stills, fashion mags, porn) and drawing on costume logos. And, of course, giving MGK an easy target for photoshop.
Ilan said
“Stark, I think you’re half-right. I think this is traced from Liefeld.
It’s like photocopying a fingerpainting.”
Copying Liefeld is ironic. Liefeld traced most of his artwork from John Byrne and Alan Davis. Not an original bone in his body. (Don’t even ask me about his Youngblood group circa 1988 with Megaton Comics. The team picture he drew was a rip from a Legion of Superheroes issue.)
But once again I digress and begin the inevitable and justified bashing of Rob “The Bad Man” Liefeld.
I’m betting this was originally traced from a Porn book, and Land couldn’t trace over anything beneath the legs at those points because there was a naked guy underneath them.
That, or he ran out of vanilla porn and is looking into the more rarefied niches.
It’s comforting to know that one can become a professional artist with the same methods I used when I was a 13-year-old gamer and all my half-elf clerics looked suspiciously like Victoria’s Secret models. (Frederick’s of Hollywood girls looked too trashy, and crotchless armor didn’t seem to have much of an AC.)
To Stark–
Liefeld traced most of his work from John Byrne and Alan Davis?!?!? Are you sure? I can’t recall anything from Byrne or Davis with such horribly disfigured bodies or total lack of perspective.
Evan Waters:
looking into the more rarefied niches.
Oh, is that what we’re calling cleavage this year?
I can’t believe no one has said anything about the DJ hands yet!
That’s not DJ hands, that’s trying to hypnotize people with attached wrist sparklers hands. You’d get tendonitis something awful trying to DJ if you had your wrists up that high. Take it from me, I’m a neurosurgeon now!
Matt A., I noticed that, too. I’m reasonably certain those hand positions would get in the way of the wrist-mounted projectile attacks she’s using.
The only way I can really justify her legs is that he is trying to portray her as coming out of the cover. But the little orange outline he uses on her legs there is used on parts that are otherwise free of the cover and overall confuses the rest of her.
But then perhaps logic isn’t the correct way to go about deciphering this mystery.
Bah, who am I kidding? It’s nothing more than really bad art.
She also seems to have had her neck surgically removed.
LAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA- *gets shot*
Maybe her secret mutant ability involves only believing in what she can see, so her feet no longer exist?
Neck removal is a much more aesthetically pleasing alternative to a quart-sized breat implant upgrade. Jesus, it’s like none of you guys on this thread have ever even SEEN a real woman.
I just know I wouldn’t go around calling myself Black Widow if I didn’t have legs. Viper, Cobra, or even The Asp (and a fine asp it is) would be more fitting, if you were committed to the “deadly venom” motif.
The funny thing is, I can totally see Osborn chopping off her legs for no reason at all.
Osborn would cut off her legs just for the fun of it.
Looks like Lands’ porn tastes are indeed heading off in all sorts of bizarre directions, huh?
Perhaps Disney is trying to make a new sort of reverse Pinocchio. Now that the Black Widow’s legs have been amputated, she is ripe for the wooden replacements.
She chopped off her legs because needed some firm muscle tissue to make up those giant things on her chest? Those are not breasts. Breasts don’t go where Land put them.
In addition to having no legs, she has a giant hand attached directly to her left upper-arm!
Mary Warner
“To Stark–
Liefeld traced most of his work from John Byrne and Alan Davis?!?!? Are you sure? I can’t recall anything from Byrne or Davis with such horribly disfigured bodies or total lack of perspective.”
Okay maybe he didn’t exactly trace pictures. More like used them for line copying. Vic Bridges traced.
Back in the day, there was this great little fight going on between Peter David and Todd McFarlane that took place in the pages of Comics Buyers Guide. The Bad Man started piping in to defend his buddy McFarlane. All this did was draw the ire of others and Peter David then went off on both McFarlane and Liefeld.
It even went so far as for the CBG to publish artwork of Liefeld’s alongside the original artwork he lifted.
And the sad part is that Land used to be an at least competent if not good artist. His older work such as Sojourn were done well. It seems that he got worse after he started working at Marvel. I blame Quesada.
That belt is the dumbest thing I have ever seen.
And yet I remember seeing a couple of pages Land did for Werewolf By Night, and as near as I can recall they were really good.
…Seriously, is it some sort of flotation device?
I’m more concerned by the fact that her left arm appears to be sticking out of where her neck should be.
Y’know, if this were traced, wouldn’t there be some passing resemblance to actual human anatomy? What on earth was he tracing?
She’s stepping out from the background like Kitty Pryde. You can’t tell because he’s lousy at giving the proper visual information… like perspective, shading, designing the background to look like something she could walk out of… to let you see it immediately.
That this sort of thing is something she can’t do is also adding to the confusion.
D’oh! My slightly amusing HTML tags were read as real tags and ignored by the software for being junk coding!
Comedy is hard.
….am I the only one having trouble loading the picture? Is there anywhere else I can actually see the horror and the travesty? I’m kind of morbidly curious now.
Why is Black Widow wearing a giant baby chew toy as a belt? Not only that, why did she choose the giant baby chew toy that looks like it would fit more comfortably on a lady 4 sizes up?
I’m pretty sure Land traced from like 5 different pictures here. I’m not talking about the whole thing, that’s a given; I mean in the area of her arms ALONE. Is the DJ gesture really the optimum mode of aiming wrist-mounted shootie things?
Oh and just to add some more her hands are the same just mirror’d and titled a bit
I’m really going to have to write up a parody on that picture.
Maybe he’s referencing copies of Nugget (the scariest magazine we had when I worked at a convenience store in the mid-90s *shudder*).
Well, what was he supposed to do? The porn model he traced was standing behind a divan! It was this, or Black Widow diving out from behind the furniture.
Maybe she could be friends with Wheelchair Wanda.
http://www.the-isb.com/?p=2124
All that light-table/shortcut garbage is pretty much the comic art equivalent of Autotune, and it seriously needs to die.
Well, it was bound to happen. She literally has bigger boobs than Jenna Jameson.
MGK, Land did it again with his cover for Uncanny #517. Psylocke is missing her legs, Emma looks incomplete, and even Scott has odd legs this time out.
“It’s comforting to know that so few artists suffer from a foot fetish”
Actually, maybe they do have a foot fetish, so they have to leave out the feet in order to have any chance of completing the work on schedule. Otherwise they’d turn in a piece three weeks late with lovingly rendered and sticky toes but the rest being rather crude.