Sometimes, you write a post to express an opinion…and sometimes, you write a post to discover one. Today’s post is going to be the latter, as I ruminate on the phenomenon that is Rob Liefeld.
For those of you who missed the 90s in comics…get down on your knees and give thanks to a merciful and just God. No, wait. That’s probably a little harsh. Seriously, for those of you who missed the 90s in comics, Rob Liefeld was one of the bona fide superstars of the medium. He began as an artist, hit it big with a stint on ‘New Mutants’, and went on to both write and draw its successor title, ‘X-Force’. Then he and a number of other major writer/artists split off from Marvel to form Image Comics, and Rob proceeded to start his own art studio where a number of Liefeld-influenced artists produced a large number of super-hero books. Eventually, after a falling out with his Image cohorts, Rob’s career kind of imploded; he’s still around and still working, but is nowhere near the phenom he was.
To a lot of people, this is cheery and heartwarming news. Nobody seems to be able to engender the kind of sheer hatred that Rob Liefeld does in the comics industry; mere mention of his name can induce apoplectic fits in certain fan circles. Fans complain that his writing is hackneyed, cliched, and derivative to the point of plagarism (when he’s got an aquatic super-hero whose name is “Namor” spelled backwards, it’s kind of hard to defend him on that count), and that his art is little more than chicken scratches with no grasp of anatomy, perspective, and no skill whatsoever.
And I don’t disagree with that assessment. I’ve heard all the stories–how he turned in pencil art that ended at the wrists and ankles, forcing an inker to fill in the hands and feet. I’ve seen his artwork, and there’s no question, it doesn’t match up with any kind of human anatomy. Women have breasts like they’re wearing a loose-fitting shirt with bowling balls dumped down it, guys have biceps bigger than their head, and everyone has about a billion teeth. It is anything but realistic.
But here’s the thing: Have you looked at Bill Sienkiewicz’s art lately? He left realism behind about thirty years ago, and fans love him for it. His art is deliberately abstract, conveying an emotional reality rather than strict photorealism, and he has more fans than he ever did when he was a Neal Adams clone. For that matter, take Vincent van Gogh. He never painted realistically, and in fact became more expressionist as he went on. Is his art bad because it doesn’t look like a photo?
But of course, Sienkiewicz did start out as a Neal Adams clone. He demonstrated that he could master perspective, anatomy, and a crisp “Silver Age” artistic style, and then branched out into his current style because it was the one he wanted to use. Perhaps that’s why he’s praised while Liefeld is pilloried; he showed that he knew how to draw first, while Liefeld never did.
Or perhaps it’s that the emotional reality Liefeld constructs seems to be one so utterly rooted in the realm of the sixteen-year-old boy. His characters are all hypermasculine uber-men with giant shoulderpads and guns bigger than their torsos. Maybe once you pass a certain age, that just starts to seem like arrested adolescence instead of an artistic style. Maybe Liefeld’s audience outgrew him.
Or maybe he just really was terrible, and it’s true that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. I really don’t know, which is why I tend to stay quiet when people are slamming Liefeld. Because it’s possible…not likely, but just possible…that in a hundred years or so, he’ll be having the last laugh.
Related Articles
58 users responded in this post
Wow. Nice post, especially noting Sienkiewicz and the subjective nature of the quality of any “art” (well. Implicitly, as that was what I inferred from the post). I remember getting Marvel Masterpieces cards from that era and distinctly disliking Sienkiewicz’s art; I knew it was interesting, but I wasn’t into comics for interesting–I was into them for superheroes drawn well, which I never thought Sienkiewicz did.
I saw a post a while back where some “fan” decided to, like, “confront” Liefeld by purchasing and then giving to Liefeld a copy of . . . “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way”? Something like that. Made me roll my eyes and wonder what the “fan” had ever contributed to comics in any real way.
I remember him along with Jim Lee. Incidental to the mid-90s. Never got into Cable or X-Force and such.
Now, Nicieza and Lobdell are a completely different story…
Heh. I remember as a teenager, picking up the latest issue of X-Force and being disappointed to see that there was a fill-in artist with a radically different style. “What’s this ‘Mike Mignola’ stuff? When’s Liefeld coming back?”
I kinda felt bad for the guy after the incident Will mentioned. Even the people who took his side couldn’t seem to do so without trashing him. “Well, I don’t think he can draw either, but that was out of line…”
If nothing else, I can admire that he has spent a fair amount of time doing his own thing (such as it is) and seems to have a lot of fun doing it.
LIEEEEEEEEEEEEFEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELD!!!
What?
I was never that impressed by Bill S. I felt when he started “branching out” in New Mutants in the 80’s (and still do) that his art was so stylized that it overshadowed, and detracted from, the story. I still do.
I think Liefeld sky-rocketing success, that pretty much defined comics in the 90’s, it must be said (he may be hated today but no one can deny he was influential), and subsequent fall from grace was not only due to hubris, but also symptomatic of another, bigger problem:
The extremely isolated and self-perpetuating consumer that is the comic book community.
I think Liefeld was a victim simply of the fans outgrowing his style. Literally. They were 13 when they loved it, by the time they were 17, not so much. Simple as that. And since the superhero comic book community does pretty much everything it can to keep new people away, Liefeld’s batch of readers started thinning out without any renewal. And of course, you can add to that his incredibly naive attempts of passing plagiarized characters as “original ideas”, inability to evolve his style (mainly due to having no art or technique to evolve at all) and the regular and expected changes in the trends and you can see why he couldn’t keep up.
His “style” was both targeted and based on a very specific group of people at a very specific time. When the times are a’changing, artists tend to adapt somewhat, mainly because what they do is communicate, and if reality changes around you, whatever you communicate changes accordingly. Liefeld didn’t do that because he was only capable of communicating to that specific group of people at that specific time (he wasn’t a “comic book artist”, he was a “90’s comic book artist”). When those people grew up, he was left with no public.
And the same people who once loved him, now despise him. Because we must always remember: Liefeld was *the bomb* once.
NEVER FORGET.
“Perhaps that’s why he’s praised while Liefeld is pilloried; he showed that he knew how to draw first, while Liefeld never did.”
EXACTLY.
You have to be able to string together a sentence before you can develop your own writing style. Liefeld is bad because he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing; Sienkiewicz is good because he obviously does. (And now I have a crush on his work. Thanks, John!) Liefeld is still held back by his anatomical errors, his overreliance on hatching, his… everything. If you are a professional artist who is paid to draw humans and you can’t draw hands or feet, there is a problem. If you can’t draw a woman’s spine, there is a problem. If you can’t draw Captain America from a 3/4 view, there is a problem.
People enjoyed his work. But enjoyability and quality are different things, and the quality of art is only subjective to a point. Liefeld is far, far past that point. He doesn’t have a style. He has sucking.
tl;dr: FROTH FROTH FROTH FROTH
Liefeld’s problem is highlighted exactly by the comparison with Sienkiewicz. Sienkiewicz *matured* as an artist, experimenting with his style, making good-faith efforts to show complexity in his work. Liefeld never matured, never calmed down his style or attempted variations on his themes. He basically stayed the same: and worse, he got lazy.
Exactly what cAlluvion said.
http://progressiveboink.com/archive/robliefeld.html
I rest my case.
Also, “A fun Liefeld drinking game: take a shot for every pouch he draws on a character. Oh great, now you have alcohol poisoning.” I lol’d.
Okay, just started reading this and I would like to point out that Liefeld never wrote anything at Marvel. The most he ever got was a co-plotter credit and that’s because Fabian was being generous.
I will probably have more to say later after reading the article and comments but
1) He is a really nice guy. I’ve seen him at like 3-4 cons in person. As a person, he is really standup
2) I hate his art. Absolutely hate it.
3) I started reading comics about a year and a half after he left marvel to start Image and I didn’t pick up anything youngblood related until he decided to to hand the art reigns off, so I never experienced him first hand. It was always after he was finished. So I got to experience him without hype and I just never saw the appeal.
4) I think he is the only artist to actually get worse with time. Even McFarlane has gone from overly Cartoony to something moderately solid.
5) The most clear image I have in my mind is picking up the Teen Titans issue he did with Gail Simone and it being the first time since that title had be relaunched under Johns that I felt disappointment. (I felt that a hell of a lot more under McKeever, but that’s neither here nor there)
6) of the Image guys, I don’t think he’s the most disappointing as he still tries, which is more than I can say for a couple of them.
Okay I’m going to go read now and if I think of anything else, I’ll be back.
I’ve actually been thinking about this very subject recently. The fact is that Liefeld does have some talent. He drew the figures in the Zodiac entry in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition #20, and while they were not special, it does show that he could draw in the Marvel Style. And his work on the 1988 Hawk and Dove mini-series was fairly good, despite early indications of the the direction it would take later. His work was cartoon-ish, much like Todd McFarlane’s and Erik Larsen’s.
Another thing is that his art grew bad because of a decrease in editorial control over art, a problem that persists to this day. Also, the work of his fellow Image founders McFarlane and Jim Lee weren’t particularly good either, yet they are seen as blameless (possibly because the former got out of comics to spend more time fondling his balls and the later returned to work for Marvel and DC). Finally, other companies began copying his work because at the time, it was popular and it sold, making us, the fans, responsible.
In summary, Liefeld may not be a good artist, but I feel the reputation he has isn’t totally deserved.
Chalk me up as another ‘me too’ of what cAlluvion said.
To expand; you have to KNOW the rules before you can BREAK. Liefeld did not make a deliberate decision to go with a hyper-stylized, unrealistic, sort-of-creepy-if-you-look-at-it-closely style after spending a lot of time examining his technique, the techniques of others, the sort of stories he was drawing FOR, and then coming to a considered decision. He went with that because he COULDN’T do anything else.
Now, that’s not necessarily illegitimate. Knowing your limitations and problem areas and working around them is important. But turning in work to your inker (who is there to INK, not to fix your inability to draw hands) that’s incomplete isn’t cool. And if you’re drawing for a major comic label it is not unreasonable to expect you to have a certain amount of versatility and talent re: the fundamentals.
Having said that? I don’t know anything about Liefeld as a person or as a professional, so I’d never presume to judge him on those matters.
Now, now people. According to Robert Kirkman, Liefeld is the second coming of Jack Kirby…
Also, speaking to Rob’s level of popularity in the 90s I’ll always remember the jeans ad he did. Which featured him wearing the jeans and being filmed working…
Most of what I could say, others have said already. I can contribute only this: “Namor” spelled backwards is “Roman,” which is still a word. I haven’t seen the character, so I don’t know how derivative it is, but out of all the Liefeld characters that are direct rip-offs, that example described in only those terms doesn’t seem quite as persuasive.
Although I do suppose a name like Roman lends itself to a battle-cry in Latin, and that could be perilously close to “Imperius Rex!” Like I said, I haven’t seen the character.
@ Burke. I don’t know if Roman existed before this, but I seem to remember him showing up in Supreme when Moore was writing it and it wasn’t so much ripping off Namor as doing an homage to aquaman.
I don’t think Liefeld get’s his due for what he brought to the comics industry and how he helped the art in comics evolve. I can understand Robert Kirkman’s attitude that Liefeld is the second coming of Kirby, because both are fantastic at getting *energy* onto the page. And Liefeld and his image cohorts really exploded that notion of what North American comic art is supposed to *look* like. Everyone was drawing in this sort of post-Adams realistic style and the image folks came along and blew up the model, and suddenly American comics looked different, for the first time since the sixties. That is important. And if you critique it on its own terms, putting energy and excitement (and pouches) onto the page, it is terrific.
I think Liefeld is a lot like the band the Stooges: very necessary in the evolution of [alternative/punk] rock music, but completely unreadable/unlistenable outside of his/their original context. But really important none the less.
So yes, Rob Liefeld is punk rock. Don’t criticise him for not knowing a fourth chord.
I am convinced that the hate Liefeld gets is due to the collective shame the comic industry feels over the 90’s. He’s a scapegoat for the whole XTREME era.
Granted, he’s not exactly an artistic great…..But seriously, there’s people even today who have art that is just as flawed as Liefeld’s, and still get work.
Why the hate for Rob Liefeld? The same reason Lindsay Lohan gets so much hate. Liefeld jumped from nowhere into superstar without moving through the “struggling to make a name” phase. Marvel hyped the hell out of him and insisted that he was a big deal, and those of us who didn’t care for his work were basically told we were wrong and that he was awesome. When he was at the top of his game he talked a lot of smack (as did every artist in the 90s for the most part) and made enemies in the industry because of it. Because of that, when he failed there were lots of people around to point and laugh.
Had Liefeld been less hyped and less coddled and forced to grow more as an artist in his initial years, he probably wouldn’t create the kind of rancor that the does.
I always thought there was an element of personal embarrassment that fueled the rancor as well. For all of the legitimate points about Liefeld’s issues with his art, there’s also the fact that many people loved his work for a good stretch of time, and now would rather not admit it. They want to project that they were the “cool” ones, who could “see through it.” Never mind the full run of early X-force they anonymously dumped when they were 19, for fear of being caught with it. And I’ll admit, I’m in that group. I was never a huge fan of Liefield, but I didn’t see a problem with his art until I got older. You do some stupid things as a kid because you lack perspective and experience, and I count missing the problems in Rob Liefield’s art as one of those.
Completely agree with cAlluvion.
@CB: I was going to post that exact link. I know next to nothing about comics, but some of those entries had me crying with laughter.
As a matter of fact, I do get down on my knees and thank whatever universal benevolence allowed me to miss the comics of the ’90s. Because I look back on that stuff now, and…wow. I’m frankly amazed that anyone, anywhere stuck with comics after seeing that stuff on the stands. What were they thinking?
Seriously.
The ’90s had Todd McFarlane, Rob Liefeld, and chromium covers.
It also had Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Jeff Smith’s Bone, and Kurt Busiek’s Astro City.
It’s been TEN YEARS since the ’90s ended, and you’d think comics fans would be willing to look back with some perspective and accept that, yes, each decade has stuff that rules and stuff that sucks. (Let me assure you that the ’80s and the ’40s had plenty of stupid terrible crap to balance out the good stuff people remember.)
It was just a bunch of comic books, not the fucking Vietnam War. Get over it.
I never thought I would do this (come to the defense of Rob Liefeld), but it has to be said: Rob Liefeld had a good idea.
http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2009/04/02/comic-book-legends-revealed-201/
When Stryfe’s face was revealed to be the same as Cable’s at the end of NEW MUTANTS #100, Liefeld intended Stryfe to BE Cable – since Cable was a time-traveler, it stood to reason that a future Cable could have fallen into madness and became the nemesis of OUR Cable (for lack of a better term) and followed him to our timeline.
I don’t know about you, but I think that holds together a lot better than “clone who was abandoned when original didn’t die as was expected”.
And Mike Mignola can’t draw feet either, and has admitted such in interviews.
You know, thinking about Rob Liefeld is always dangerous business. I don’t think I can bring anything to the table except my own remembrances of that era.
14-year-old John 2.0 might have had bad taste, but he was also tired of two years of later-day house-style Jim Aparo in Detective Comics. 14-year-old John 2.0 didn’t have a lot of artistic perspective,(you couldn’t get Showcase collections back then and 14-year-old John 2.0 couldn’t afford back-issues) and thought Jim Aparo/John Bryne style and layout as the “default setting.”
Now 35-year-old-in-a-week John 2.0 (holy crap! I’m old!) appreciates Jim Aparo, and goes out of his way to pick up old B&Bs, but 14-year-old John 2.0 was just happy to see something in a style that was identifiably different.
And it may be hard to believe since he’s become the poster child for the 90’s gilded age, but in 1989 there was a LOT worse stuff on the stands than Liefeld, thanks to the final throes of the 80’s black and white explosion (hell, 14-year-old John 2,0 loved Hamster Vice. I still have the full run). So Liefeld’s work on new mutants and in Marvel Comic Presents was something new and different and welcome. It didn’t age well, but neither did Milli Vanilli or the Spice Girls.
You can be critical of the guy for his lack of growth, or his self promotion, or his plagiarism/unoriginality, But the guy DID bring something new to the table back in ’89. And of all those ‘hot’ 90’s artists, how many are still working today, and producing work of any value (I think Jae Lee is one of who has any critical acclaim. Although I’ll defend the MAXX to my dying breath)? You might not like Liefeld, but the guy LOVES comics and lives the dream.
I guess this is a long way to say Liefeld doesn’t all the crap laid at his feet (some, sure). Don’t hate the player, etc.
@DarrenK
I don’t think it’s so much that he “doesn’t know a fourth cord” but that he “has never picked up a guitar in his life, and just made millions of dollars by randomly putting notes together.” Sort of like John Mayer, or Simple Plan.
Man, that analogy really started falling apart there.
I had never heard the bit about Liefeld not even bothering to finish drawing the ‘hard’ parts, like hands and feet. Boy, if Vince Colletta had ever been assigned as his inker, we probably would have had 22 pages of empty panels.
cAlluvion nailed it. Watching an artist take the time to learn the fundamentals, and then striking out on their own path is always exciting to see. But an artist like Liefeld who ignores the basics because he’s too lazy or whatever to bother with them is something else altogether.
I guess I sort of agree with Darren K on Liefeld’s importance as sort of a marker in the development of superhero comics (“comics look a certain way today because of a lot of factors, and this run of New Mutants/X-Force is one of them”). But that’s not the same as saying he’s a good artist. Or that he was a good artist back in his 90’s heyday. But even under those terms I think talking about Liefeld/comics the same way we would talk about the Stooges/punk is really giving the guy WAY too much credit.
Liefeld did indeed bring “energy” to the page with his huge two page spreads of characters charging or fighting or whatever, but it was energy without context. The big idea he brought to comics in the 90s was that you could skip all that annoying “buildup” and “plot” and just skip straight to the awesome kewl scene where everybody is firing huge guns. The movement came down to self-indulgent artists no longer wanting to work with a team and service the story, and I feel we’re still paying the price for his crap a decade later. Whenever you see a panel with a female character somehow managing to show both her ass and her tits at the same time, with no reason on earth why she should be in such a pose, blame old Rob.
People disliking Sienkiewicz for not being “superhero enough” sums up everything that makes me sad about superhero fandom.
Darren K: I agree with your assessment until you compare Rob Liefeld to the Stooges. Fact of the matter is ‘Raw Power’ is to this day still an album that can demolish the fuck out of most hard rock competitors in regards to aggression and craft, and . . . well, Liefeld isn’t exactly the comic artist equivalent of that.
A better analogy would be that Rob Liefeld is Fred Durst. He was very popular and now very few people will admit they liked him.
I will take Rob over the “I trace photographs and have flat static looking art” guys though.
@KenB3: That sums up Liefeld pretty well, actually.
The Stooges are still awesome and John Mayer is apparently an amazing guitar player
and yeah Liefield is basically Fred Durst. you appreciate the energy and aggression but there’s no talent or skill behind it
@Ken,
Oh, A-fucking-men.
Rob at least draws his own shit. He doesn’t replicate photographs and I’m fairly certain that despite how he’s generally drawn women he’s never actually taken porn shots, traced over them, and then presented them into his work as normal poses.
It’s sad that this is ACTUALLY a virtue rather than something you just assume won’t happen.
I’m about three years older than John 2.0 and I was old enough to know better when Liefeld got popular. I had been exposed to artists like Dave Cockrum, George Perez, Joe Kubert, Mike Grell and Walt Simonson at a young age, so I was definitely biased toward people who drew things like… backgrounds.
Seventeen year old me was more into people such as Art Adams, Klaus Janson, Jon J. Muth, Tim Truman or Matt Wagner.
I never had a Liefeld phase, because I always thought his stuff was crap.
I was more into Jackson Guice, frankly. That was about as stylized as I was willing to get except for a few rare exceptions such as Stray Toasters.
Also… part of the reason why Hawk and Dove actually looked good is that Karl Kesel redrew stuff. Liefeld has complained about Kesel “ruining” his pencils in interviews before.
I think part of the hate for Rob Liefeld is comic book fans hating themselves but being way too scared to admit it. It’s like how they decry authors for trying to make comics how they were when the author was a child, but in their very next breath denouncing modern comics as being grim’n’gritty rapefests and that they should return to the halcyon days when heroes were heroic . . . a period that they never, ever mention coincides with when that particular fan was a child.
@Murc
One of the biggest criticisms against Liefield was his panels stealing from artists from the 80’s. There was a year-long debate that took place in the pages of the Comic Buyers Guide where artwork from John Byrne was show along side of Liefield’s artwork it was revealed that Liefield either traced or did line copies.
Heck there was an original drawing of the Youngblood team from before their Image debut that was a direct rip-off of the DC Who’s Who entry for the Legion of Superheroes.
Liefield is a hack. A copier. A jackass. Plain and simple.
So, I picked up comics in the 90s. I got to watch the Fantastic Four turn from lovable family of eccentrics to dysfunctional half-naked nut cases and I got to read four different Supermen and Spawn bounce back and forth from Hell.
And, honestly, I liked it. The characters were – to me – new and original. The plots were not particularly deep, but had enough twists to keep me entertained and enough comic-book philosophy to drive my imagination. I was a kid just getting off Power Rangers and transitioning to LotR. Image/DC/Marvel was a good half-way point.
And I had absolutely no problem with Liefield style. Probably because I was 14 and simply didn’t know any better. But comics books were still a kid’s medium. I wasn’t analyzing the depth and texture and consistency of every panel. I was just reading for fun.
The comically huge muscles and ridiculously exaggerated private parts didn’t seem out of place because these were the features that caught a teenage boy’s eyes anyway.
Liefield’s plagiarism not-withstanding, his art didn’t bother me in the least. Honestly, it still doesn’t. It remains unpolished and unimproved, but so what? He’s not the first mediocre comic book artist, and it’s not like Youngbloods and X-Force were prime comic book real estate before he got a hold of them.
When he starts drafting Archie, then you can go into a flaming hissy fit.
@The Stark
I was unaware of that. Wow. That makes me downgrade Liefeld enormously as a person. There’s a line between ‘that scene was awesome, I’ll freehand my own version of it’ and ‘fetch me my tracing papers, boy!’
(I missed a lot of the Liefeld drama as it happened; I was too young.)
For me, it’s not that he started out without having a basic grounding in drawing. Lots of artists have started out pretty shaky and picked it up as they went along. It’s that Liefeld never did pick it up.
Here we are a decade later and despite all his success he still hasn’t taken the time to learn how to draw feet. Or much of anything else.
I owned a piece of a comic book store that just opened when Image hit in the early ’90s. All I can say is that, for a while, Image paid our rent every month, including Rob Liefield.
That being said, I didn’t like any of the Image books. I especially didn’t like Liefield; didn’t like him on New Mutants, or on X-Force. And, for the most part, I didn’t like any of the Liefield clones of the era.
The reason I didn’t like them is that most of them weren’t drawing stories; they were drawing pinups. There was no linear flow to their work. If it weren’t for the words, you wouldn’t know what was going on; even with the words, you might not know what was going on.
I don’t think comics have entirely recovered from this trend. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I just can’t follow what’s going on in most comics anymore.
L.
@The Stark
Can you give us references as to your claims, such as issue numbers and what book in the second case?
Uber Geek, this site (which I found off the wiki entry for Liefeld) has collected a lot of his obvious swipes for comparison: http://blog.adlo.es/swipe_of_the_week/rob_of_the_week/2006/08/
@Brian T. I know about Kesel redrawing Liefeld’s art on ‘Hawk and Dove’. He was the one who (supposedly) got Liefeld art that stopped at the wrists and ankles. (On issue #5, apparently, which had a tight deadline, but that’s no excuse.)
Rob Liefeld is laughing already. He is laughing all the way to the bank.
Or perhaps it’s that the emotional reality Liefeld constructs seems to be one so utterly rooted in the realm of the sixteen-year-old boy. His characters are all hypermasculine uber-men with giant shoulderpads and guns bigger than their torsos. Maybe once you pass a certain age, that just starts to seem like arrested adolescence instead of an artistic style. Maybe Liefeld’s audience outgrew him.
Or maybe he just really was terrible, and it’s true that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. I really don’t know, which is why I tend to stay quiet when people are slamming Liefeld. Because it’s possible…not likely, but just possible…that in a hundred years or so, he’ll be having the last laugh.
Maybe it’s because Liefeld still can’t be bothered to finish drawing people’s arms.
@Dan
Hey! Wait a minute. Isnt that a rip off of this cover?
Bah!
As someone who properly started collecting with Image, I can say with confidence that a lot of Liefeld’s (and his studio’s) output was generic and derivative. Supreme was Superman with a bad attitude. Youngblood, Bloodstrike and associated titles had clear ties to X-Men and Avengers, just with more blood.
I will also say that his art style did improve between the start of Image and his departure.
You could also point out that his work with Alan Moore on titles like Supreme helped move Moore towards his development of America’s Best Comics and those titles (Liefeld says Moore’s pitches for Awesome Press look very similar to some of the ABC titles, so you can choose to believe that or not).
However, over the years Liefeld has continually shown himself to be unreliable as a publisher – so many titles promised, so few delivered or delivered late – and to a degree he suffers the blowback seen by other wunderkind. He was young, got a lot of money, was famous in certain circles and (as stated above) wasn’t seen to have ‘paid his dues’. Out of the Image guys – who did attract criticism for daring to leave Marvel (and DC? Can’t remember off hand) – he was probably the one to make the most public blunders that keep the ire on him.
He wasn’t the worst artist, worst writer or undeserving of his success / money, but he was the right combination of factors that led to some fans being vocal about their dislike of his work (and, by extension, him personally).
Dan: For Liefeld that’s actually really good. Its not nearly as bad as half the stuff he released in the late Marvel/ early Image days. Maybe its the inker, but lets give him the benefit of the dought.
Thousand Sons: If you’ll look at Liefeld’s signature you’ll see that he credits Perez. As a matter of fact, Perez stole the “man holds body of dead comrade in his arms” off someone else. Wizard once had an article of all the comics that have ever done that as a cover. The first is from the 30s of something. So, don’t blame him for that.
@Uber Geek
Back in middle to late 80’s, Rob Liefield worked for an independent comic company called Megaton Comics. They had a few titles under their belt (Megaton and Vanguard) plus a few more they were trying to promote. They were giving away a free comic book to highlight their company and one of the ‘previews’ included was a team book called Youngblood. The book was being hyped as written and directed by Rob Liefield and included this 2 page splash panel of the team. The picture was an almost exact line for line copy of the LSH from Who’s Who, simply recolored.
As for the CBG issues with the debate about Liefield’s lack of original panels, it was a much heated affair between Peter David and Todd McFarlane, that was handled in their letters section. Peter David gave examples and McFarlane tried to deny the claims, until people started sending in examples. Eventually John Byrne got involved when it revealed how many lifts Liefield was taking from him. I can’ tell you the issue numbers but I can tell you this happened during the early to mid 90’s. Maybe someone with a collection of CBG’s might shed more light.
I will admit no one will ever be able to say anything that will make me change my opinion of Liefeld. He is one of the reasons comics suck so much today. The concept of style over substance that Image Comics exemplified. Their move to make sure creators retained rights was brilliant. Their egos after their success completely childish.
@Lister Sage
Ah. You have sharper eyes than me. Point taken.
I just assumed Liefeld was being derivative again. I mean, he was, but credit where credit is due helps. An interesting montage of that Crisis cover and its inspiration can be found here!
I will say this for Liefeld: His art *has* improved. I read his 2008 X-Force revamp online recently, and it looks he’s taken some of the criticism seriously. Look! Cable has legs! And feet! The story itself is kind of lame, but hey! Better art! 😀
Sorry, it’s not a matter of stylized vs. realistic. It’s a matter of a well-constructed, appealing aesthetic vs. lumpy, poorly defined inconsistency. Plenty of artists have exaggerated anatomy, but they make it work cohesively and gracefully. Frank Miller figures are kind of ridiculous, but the way he uses them in terms of pose, composition, and inking quality make them look great. Ditto for Mignola and his feet. You wouldn’t know he can’t draw feet from most of his art, because he blocks out figures in ways that it’s unnecessary, and in the few panels where the feet are visible, they don’t look offensively bad because Mignola’s stye leaves room for vaguery. Liefield on the other hand put his figures in awkward poses just to cover up the feet, and they looked like shit when he puts them in. His art doesn’t look stylized, just shitty.
I’ve given this page a once-over (I’m so far behind on my MGK; it’s shameful of me), and it looks safe, but if anyone says anything bad about Bill Sienkiewicz, I’ll have to reach through the Internet and strangle you. 🙂
I still love Rob, love Bill Sienkiewicz, and I love punk and The Stooges! I recognise all the flaws of Liefeld, both professional and personal, and yet I find him fascinating. His work still carries that energy for me that I saw when I was younger, perhaps it all comes down to nostalgia.
Bill Sienkiewicz can draw, and his weirdness is stylized intentionally. Liefeld can’t draw if he wanted to; either that or he’s just lazy as Hell with his randomly sized, shaped and placed people and props changing from panel to panel.
Put me down in the “he really was that bad” column. Liefeld has almost zero technical proficiency beyond “building up areas with lots of cross-hatching”. That’s it. Beyond cross-hatching his next strongest attribute is sheer volume of pouches and straps.
The funny thing about Rob Liefeld is that whatever he draws himself, people criticize. However anything he copies from another artist, he still gets slammed. So basically anything he does gets him in trouble. Yet some people still love him, like this guy: http://www.orgamesmic.com/rob-liefeld-is-a-good-artist/