in retrospect, how did Rob Liefeld ever manage to hold down a artist job in the comics industry?

Have you ever noticed that all of his faces look like his face?

heh

!!!

I just really need to know how the inker/colourist feels about having to work with images like that.

Hahaha!

Levels.

I pray I never see it again.

why do people keep asking me this?

(Are you sure?)

Rob of Finland!

oh crap, coffee all over the keyboard again. Damn you, Liefeld!

This is exactly it, combined with the fact that Rob Liefeld has the taste and enthusiasm of an eight year old boy. He can totally tap into a certain mentality and aesthetic like few other people. Unfortunately, this aesthetic is pretty laughable, but it's definitely the reason why he had so much early success.

I just read that Wikipedia entry - it actually doesn't seem all that imbalanced to me.

I remember being really disappointed when the regular series came out and he wasn't the penciller! Admittedly, that was probably the last time I was disappointed not to be looking at Liefeld's art, but there really WAS a time when the McFarlane/Larsen/Liefeld style really seemed like a neat new thing (maybe it helped if you were 12 years old then). Larsen on Doom Patrol, McFarlane on Hulk and Amazing Spider-Man-- all good (the shiteness of "Spider-Man #1 by Todd McFarlane" (props to Mark Martin) probably put an end to this though, even before the Image era came along).

Via Douglas:
http://progressiveboink.com/archive/robliefeld.html

just giggling my ass off at work reading that.

I saw that during the blackout and meant to post it when we came back up. I'm glad you guys got to see it.

"He wears a baseball cap backwards, and when he turns it around it's still backwards."

"Your characters aren't shitting out ladders when they jump."

I can't figure whether liefeld, miller or mcfarlane is the main reason why I don't post here except to talk about old graphic novel reprints, and looking at that, I'm pretty sure the answer is liefeld.

Jesus.

I haven't read them in years, but I remember thinking that Todd McFarlene's run of Spider-man and especially the Hulk with Peter David that were pretty good. McFarlene was really good at drawing fight scenes and action. There was always a bunch of detail of glass and rock flying all over the place.

I completely missed the whole Image comics boom/bust from the 90s. At least from the couple episodes I saw, I thought that Spawn cartoon HBO did was OK. I never read the comic.

I've got the Hulk run on a DVD, so I may have to revisit those issues. I thought the Mr. Fixit issues were pretty cool way to bring back the gray Hulk. Peter David was one of the better mainstream comic writers of the late 80s.

At least from what I have read of McFarlene, he seems like a douche, so i can understand the blow back, but I remember liking those Marvel issues he did.

#24 won't load for me. :(

McFarlane did have a great run on AS-M but jesus, Image was so horrible. Dark times.

SPAWN #11, written by Frank Miller, is the worst comic I've ever read. I still remember vividly how awful and repellent it was.

Via Douglas:
http://progressiveboink.com/archive/robliefeld.html

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/assets/product/0618709274.gif

so

http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2009/08/the-real-crime-was-the-hat/

Thanx 4 new screenname.

I agree with Cameron Stewart that this was a pretty juvenile prank. Since people were willing to buy shitloads of his crappy comics in the 1990s, is it really his fault that he saw no reason to improve his craft?

Dude's a tool, I mean, everything in the tone of that blog post certifies him as such. I don't think artists should have to "apologize" for messing up characters (except perhaps to their creators?), either, whole thing's pretty retarded. Plus, you know, TAKING A STAND against Rob Liefeld in 2009.

I don't agree with your argument tho Tuomas, of course the guy should have kept working at his craft! He should have recognized the adulation of the public for the shallow thing it is and followed his muse to ever more challenging territories, allowing the talent we saw on X-Force and Youngblood to bloom to its full potential ;)

The thing is, though... that it did bloom to its full potential.

btw:

http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/wp-content/uploads//2009/07/IMG_6988.jpg

^^^^ awesome

hahahahaha

For an incredibly hatable guy he is extremely likable!

he has the pleasant joyful demeanor of new money! not like those sour new england types.

(am looking for a picture of gary brodsky frowning for contrast)

of course the guy should have kept working at his craft!

any minute now, he's going to break out those life drawings that he told Hart Fisher would blow Fisher's mind. that was only, what, eleven years ago?

If Rob Liefeld revealed himself to actually be a highly-competent draftsman who had been churning out wretched garbage for years simply for a larf, I think I would love Rob Liefeld to the max.

any minute now, he's going to break out those life drawings that he told Hart Fisher would blow Fisher's mind. that was only, what, eleven years ago?

It'll be so weird when he finally realeases those and it turns out they're all oil paintings of the Keyboard Cat.

"If Rob Liefeld revealed himself to actually be a highly-competent draftsman"

this would be a great prank by the robster for sure, but also justifies all sorts of abuse, including throwing marvel instructional books at him. anything mean-spirited about liefeld-bashing evaporates if it turns out he wasn't earnestly trying to the best of his ability.

Not Liefeld, but crikey:

http://i.newsarama.com/images/12_astonishing_x_men__xenogenesis_1_02.jpg

man you give a guy one issue of KING magazine and the next thing you know the white queen has a MASSIVE ASS

that's a swipe from the two gargantuassed chicks on the beach that made the rounds some years ago and I claim my five dollars

has to be on confounded's culture corner thread

Not Liefeld, but

Can we have an actual name then?

The link says it's Kaare Andrews. I think he's the guy who wrote and drew that weird Spider-Man dystopia story, where Mary Jane was killed by Spider-Man's radioactive sperm. I thought he did a nice enough Milleresque job there, but the pic above is a bit silly. I wouldn't mind him drawing superheroines with some proper ass, as not so many artists tend to do that, but the butt-to-waist ration on Storm and Emma is ridiculous. Also, the ankles on the girl on the left look seriously anorexic. He's not Liefeld-level crappy though, for example I think he's pretty good at drawing faces.

He's most likely still better than Simone Bianchi, who did a terrible, terrible job on Astonishing X-Men. I'd take big butts over Bianchi's stiff and lifeless painted figures any day. And at least Andrews can draw some proper action scenes, with Bianchi's crappy art they were almost impossible to follow.

on the evidence of Morrison's Shining Knight, Bianchi can actually draw humans, unlike that pic above, but yes, is a completely incompetent cartoonist.

Knight and Day is freakin' great! @TomCruise is at his finest! Tons of great action, thrills and laughs. Real crowd pleaser!

31 minutes ago via web
robertliefeld

"The link says it's Kaare Andrews. I think he's the guy who wrote and drew that weird Spider-Man dystopia story, where Mary Jane was killed by Spider-Man's radioactive sperm."

what

yes, it happened

okay now I am mad, why am I agreeing with Rob Liefeld about anything, let alone a wafer-thin movie

speaking of Movies: http://splashpage.mtv.com/2010/05/12/brett-ratner-youngblood-movie-x-men/

Also, is this a Liefeld record number of pouches?:

http://imgur.com/JAHhG.jpg

I count 18 visible.

who is the dude standing on the right

please please please tell me it is NOT Barack Obama

Okay, it's not.

But this sure is :D

http://imgur.com/NH8H1.jpg

my favourite things about this page:

1) Obama's fucked up nutsack of a hand and kipper feet in panel 1

2) the botched attempt at tracing the first GIS match for "barack smiling" ( really) in panel 2

3) playing aeroplanes in panel 3. or, i guess... miming heavy suitcases?

4) the fact that the presidents bodyguards are literally 2 Crude Dudes . I guess neither of them were "a bad enough dude to rescue the president"

I mean if you're going to get into tracing photos, why not trace a photo of some non-deformed hands and feet, or a picture of some people walking in a normal, human manner? I know i shouldn't be trying to apply reasons to the artistic decisions of Rob Liefeld but I can't help myself he is just so bad

Obama's left nutsackhand in the first panel is a biiiiig improvement on his left hand in the cover (?) picture

I think Obama's facial expression in the last panel is supposed to be "holy shit, 2 snipers" since those bullets are very obviously coming from different directions

why is obama's head so tiny?

hahahahaha

in the Liefeldverse that is akin to asking "why is the sky blue?" or "why are their feet so tiny?" or "what happened to that dude's hand?" or "is that character supposed to be obsessed with pouches?"

(xpost) because the guy can't draw for shit?

There was a thread here on image comics I sort of remember? I can't find it, maybe I imagined it....

Gotta say, if I was hiring artists today (something which I'm occasionally in a position to do), I'd have been polite, but unhesitant in passing that sample right by.

how is that different to any other page Liefeld has every drawn in his life?

Distinct lack of pouches. And there's feet in *two* panels!

With that panel sequence, Liefeld has displaced Fletcher Hanks as champion of something.

...so you'd have hired him if only he'd included more pouches and fewer feet?

No, the work would have to be a lot better. And display a fundamental knowledge of lighting (the colorist shouldn't have to do everything, mang.)

again, that's not distinguishing this from the rest of his ouevre!

god I have to say that it has been literally a decade since I even thought the words "rob liefield". what a terrible, terrible artist

His characters have three facial expressions: tight-lipped, shit-eating grin or yawning.

Yawning generally representing angry or just been shot in the head.

tbf, Liefeld himself seems to only have those three expressions.

http://worldofwardcrap.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/98692-14213-rob-liefeld_large-1.jpg

http://thenoisingmachine.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/robliefeld.jpg

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/imagecomics/images/thumb/a/ab/Rob_Liefield,_comic_convention.jpg/200px-Rob_Liefield,_comic_convention.jpg

http://www.comicsbulletin.com/features/images/011407rob/rob1.jpg

http://torvald.gjovaag.com/2009ECCC/TrollECCC2009_RobLiefeld.jpg

http://www.sparehed.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/ecr06.jpg

the original douchey mccool

I only saw a picture of Liefeld years after I first read his comics - it was pretty funny to look at him and suddenly realize why he draws all his characters with a particular type of face.

http://www.the-isb.com/images/CourageRob02.jpg

it was pretty funny to look at him and suddenly realize why he draws all his characters with a particular type of face.

i think that's quite common tbh - for artists to draw people who skew towards their own features...

Even some of the current popular artists, you pretty much can't tell about one character from another. David Finch I guess is pretty popular, but pretty much almost every character on this cover looks like the same person in the face.

http://reilly2040.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/brightest_day0.jpg

hawkman is rocking a very liefeld-y expression!

Green chick rocking very Liefeld-y boobs.

It is kind kind of like Liefield with Art Adams sense of crazy detail, in a way.

Yeah I can see Adams in the mix.

otm about one facial expression anyway

Superheroes should never smile. Ever.

i have actually been reading/buying brightest day (i know i know) and i have no idea who that is to aquaman's left.

It looks like Aquaman in black with a gun, but my best guess is that supposed to be Nemesis.

Maxwell Lord?

yeah max lord has been rocking the underarm holster and pistols look of late but not with bleached hair (giffen justice league:generation lost jli reunion thing is pretty good btw).

finch sucks but he is not capable of liefeld hilarity.

[adding post to clear weird bookmark weirdness]

Charles Brownstein:

I got to watch Rob Liefeld give a presentation on character design, where he was incredibly charming, and won everyone over by demonstrating the fundamentals of Deadpool’s costume and saying “If I get to be 90 years old and I’m remembered as that guy who couldn’t draw hands or feet, but could design a character that lasts, that’s more than enough for me.”

http://www.hypebeast.com/image/2009/07/meanwhile-at-the-hall-of-justice-comic-exhibition-02.jpg

http://robliefeldcreations.com/?p=2370

http://robliefeldcreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/photo3.jpghttp://robliefeldcreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/photo3.jpghttp://robliefeldcreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/photo3.jpg

to be clear: he made that himself

Haha, no way.

http://robliefeldcreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/photo37copy.jpg

I'm surprised to say that I'm actually starting to like this guy

via comicsalliance:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.comicsalliance.com/media/2011/03/extremejustice.jpg

doh.
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.comicsalliance.com/media/2011/03/extremejustice.jpg

In the interest of posterity, Finch's Brightest Day cover above features 14 characters, 6 feet.

http://www.rickworley.com/2012/02/26/some-more-robservations-about-rob-liefeld/

uh there is plenty of reason to call Liefeld a douche beyond not liking some past associations you have with his art, no matter how charming he was to you

And those reasons are?

abuse of the market

inciting children to physical riot

stealing art from Rick Veitch

dishonest business dealings

failing to pay royalties

& al

I actually made a long post about why I considered him a douche, and in my blog about meeting him, I said I didn't take it back. http://www.rickworley.com/2012/02/17/rob-liefeld-douchebags-of-comics/ He's still getting a trading card in my Douchebags of Comics series. What I did say was that he gets a lot of credit from me for how he handled somebody saying something like that about him, and I stand by that, too.

inciting children to physical riot

????

Image convention panels circa 1993, see TCJ reports of the time

(I will withdraw this if it turns out it was only Lee and Silvestri)

Hi Rick, welcome to I Love Comics!

yep, howdy
would like to hear more about how rob stole art from rick veitch

looks like it's alluded to here? http://www.rickveitch.com/2008/05/07/new-jack-city/

ah, i thought you meant he SWIPED the art and that didn't make sense as i can't think of two styles more opposed
well i can, but you get my meaning

there was a hilarious year or three where Liefeld would pop up on message boards, and Veitch would ask "hey where's my art and why haven't you paid royalties on the Supreme reprints," and Liefeld would be "huh what art, and I didn't publish that collection so man, I don't know anything about that" and three months later he'd pop up and Veitch would go "hey where's my art and why haven't you paid royalties on the Supreme reprints," and Liefeld would be "what the hell man, I've been busy, why would you expect that art back, it's only been three years. oh and I talked to the dude, that book hasn't made a profit so there's no royalties yet," and then Veitch would say "hey where's my art and how are those books not in profit when there have been multiple printings and second volumes," and Rob would go "JESUS DUDE, I went into my WAREHOUSE because I know exactly where your art is OF COURSE, but it's on a REALLY HIGH SHELF and I knocked something else down while I was reaching for it, and HURT MY BACK, it's REALLY INSENSITIVE of you to bring it up because I might get hurt again if I go and try and get it."

^^ the Checker royalties weren't actually in the same conversation as the original art iirc, but the narrative of Rob's response re art returns is p accurate

Howdy to you all, too!

inciting children to physical riot

???

asked and answered

Not really, you just said to dig some old TCJ issues. Can you tell us a bit more about these "riots"?

Not everyone has a back catalogue of those available, sadly.

Not everyone likes to go off and rummage through back issues they may or may not have when someone on an internet forum who has raised the subject would be able to answer the question more quickly.

That story about Liefeld not getting round to paying people is almost endearing me to him, in a sympathy for the crap kind of way.

http://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/6/14/3084348/the-second-40-worst-rob-liefeld-drawings

http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1185120/regex6a_medium.jpg

She's completely dry, first of all, despite the fact that water is spraying her in the side of the head. It also STOPS at the side of her head and doesn't go anywhere else despite the thigh-high amount of steam building up and the random bubbles rising to the ceiling. To make things even worse, she's showering in panties and is dropping the soap, because sex. And her shoulders are four times wider than her hips. And she's casting a huge shadow on the wall, meaning the light is coming in I guess from the bottom of her shower. And she's wearing lip liner, I think. Oh and also THIS PIECE OF SHIT IS IN A PUBLISHED COMIC AND WAS DRAWN BY A MILLIONAIRE.

I've added a new portrait of Todd McFarlane to go with the one of Rob Liefeld in my Douchebags of Comics series, along with several others including JMS and Dan DiDio- http://www.rickworley.com/douchebags-of-comics/ Enjoy :)

Okay. Breathe. forks, that article had me hyperventilating, which is bet when you have a respiratory infection.

And good job on the new entries Rick. Though I think you were too kind to Todd.

yeah, that thing had me laughing my ass off too

Is is The Big Mystery to me, and a big part of the reason why I quit reading the things for the better part of a decade. Not Liefield specifically, but the whole Image pinups-not-storytelling movement.

― I do feel guilty for getting any perverse amusement out of it (Rock Hardy), Thursday, October 27, 2005 7:18 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I never recovered (wrt to mainstream comics). By the time the Liefeld/Lee/Toddy style was waning, the NEW SCHOOL OF AWESOME DIGITAL COLORING had taken hold and that shit's just as off-putting to my eyes.

i grew up on that stuff unfortunately. in fact for the first few years i was into comics (8-10 years old) i was a diehard Image kid only

so many of those allegedly superbad drawings a look at and go 'eh, its comics'

I will say Liefeld's idea of breasts is one of the most hilarious things

Also his notion that the head of the penis is located at the end of the arm.

EZ, really, too kind to Todd? I said he was a sellout and a hack. Liefeld has the crown as the worst of the Image artists, but I did say that Todd's women look freakish.

I think I was letting your kind thoughts towards him as a kid color over the vitriol. Re-reading, there's plenty of "Todd is a shit human" stuff in there. Didn't see a mention of the Miracleman douche behavior though.

Heh, well if I mentioned every single douche thing some of these people have done, the blogs would be too long for anybody to read. I'm mostly trying to mention the things that I have personal recollections of.

Victory Chainsaw- Any time Rob draws lady parts it's hilarious. I'm still trying to figure out why that woman is wearing underwear in the shower. Also trying to figure out why she had loaves of French bread surgically implanted in her shoulders.

The thing about Rob is, you've gotta give him points for entertainment value. Sometimes I'll stare at Rob Liefeld pages much longer than pages by people who can actually draw, because my brain is trying to figure out what it is I'm looking at and why it exists. To compare Rob to somebody else I'm doing a Douchebags of Comics card of, I think Rob's drawings of women are much funnier than any joke Scott Adams ever wrote in Dilbert.

Didn't Todd pay millions for that Mark McGwire home run baseball at his douchey peak? Yeah, far too much assholery for you to document it all.

I think he paid one million for it, and pretty much did it for the publicity because he knew there would be headlines about this guy paying a million dollars for a baseball, at least that's how I remember seeing it.

Wiki says he paid $3 million for it! Egad.

Yikes. Yeah, total doucheitude. You'd think if he has $3 million for baseballs he wouldn't have to argue with Neil Gaiman about royalties.

He had to argue about royalties because he spent all his money on a baseball!

I'm still a bit curious about Leifeld (& Lee/Silvestri...?) inciting kids to riot?

hurling variant covers into crowds at SDCC iirc

Every time this thread gets revived I end up drawing a bunch of ridiculous looking Liefield-style ladies and it's terrible fun.

lol. post some!

Yes!

I thought MacFarlane was the Image creator with the baseball purchase habit?

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg256/scaled.php?server=256&filename=cbbe.jpg&res=landing

http://desmond.imageshack.us/Himg99/scaled.php?server=99&filename=ladymy.jpg&res=landing

lol, awesome. though you obviously have a better anatomical foundation than RL

ha barely!

When visualizing the way he draws breasts think of two grapefruits in a plastic shopping bag

Oh mercy.

lol

Lady Mazonga's hands = hilarious!

Abbott does better feet.

Abbott does better feet.

lol, those are EXCELLENT

i'm pretty sure these would sell better than liefeld right now. (hint hint!)

to whom??

to Philip, obv

A+ is for Abbbottt

does no one but me want to see "lady mazonga and pals: a tribute to rob liefeld" outsell actual rob liefeld titles?

I think we would all like to see that

how much did Rub The Blood sell? (how much would Strong Female Characters sell if Beaton was printing it?)

i would totally buy string female characters

Make a zip, I will upload. Lady Mazonga and Pals: a Tribute to Rob Liefeld (2012)(abbbotttPre55)(c2c)(2nd Printing)(Variant)(ZachTdog-DCP-Minutemen).cbz No money for you, but my humiliation would be sweet.

http://roboconnery.tumblr.com/post/28663214472

that is awesome.

lady mazongas was in aeon flux iirc

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2012/08/23/rob-liefeld-quits-dc-on-twitter-names-names-and-points-fingers/

nu-52 thread

just sent this email to a friend of mine, titled "weird dream"

'You and I walked down some stairs and ran into Rob Liefeld. He assumed you wanted his advice, so he was all like "yeah let's talk at such and such a time" and then he went behind a door. I ask you "how come he's not at DC any more?" and you were like "if you're not really fluid with ink [good with ink] then you shouldn't draw fractal shapes."'

I never have public figures show up in my dreams. Why did it have to be Liefeld.

Did you at any point look down at his feet? Did the dream blur or snap back up at that point?

lol

“Rob Liefeld is to today,” says Rob Liefeld, “as Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan are to my kids.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/doers/2013/01/rob_liefeld_s_prophet_and_glory_revamped.single.html

The CBR interview Weigel links to is a hoot.

RE: PROPHET - "There are some massive spoilers and twists that I can't reveal, but these guys have attacked this series and it's easily my favorite of the bunch!"

A paragraph later, RE: GLORY - "'Glory' is going to wow people. 'Glory' is easily my favorite of this new launch!"

Liefeld!

Prophet is pretty cool, though

Rob Liefeld is easily Rob Liefeld's favorite Rob Liefeld of these Rob Liefelds.

otrl

http://www.dreammoviecast.com/dream-movies/exclusive-rob-liefeld-icons-screenplay-image-comics-casting-picks

http://www.dreammoviecast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Image_excerpt_3_Page_2.jpg

http://www.dreammoviecast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Image_excerpt_1_Page_1.jpg

"Rob is startled, this is straight up gangster"

oh my god

http://www.dreammoviecast.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/rob-liefeld-easy-e2.jpg

wow

Fuuuuuuuuuck me.
(pause)

i will pay money to see this

It's Shane Carruth's post-upstream color project.

BEING ROB LIEFELD. SEE IT NEXT SUMMER.

Easy-E (sic)

this prophet thing w/ brandon graham sounds kinda rad, is it any good?

the new book? yeah, it's great!

You draw good brothers brutha.

for some reason i want to see rob liefeld and guy fieri in the same photo now.

It's Easy-E, Rob's favorite rapper, whose name he does not know

http://www.tcj.com/he-was-said-to-have-loved-it-when-you-called-him-big-poppa/

He is INTENSE at all times

Todd McFarlane is a repo man?

http://robliefeldcreations.com/how-to-beat-the-haters-how-i-do-it/

"And that's from the man that gave Cap boobs."

You know another way to beat the haters, Rob? Learn how to competently do the things that you've been paid a lot of money to do.

Anyway. He seems like an alright guy for someone who's spent his entire career generating wretched content.

He's already beat the haters, lounging on his piles of money. I'm still amazed what he got out of X-Force, Cable, Deadpool, etc.
But yeah, surprisingly level-headed opinions from the dude in the Levis commercial

"You are going to get poked."

Jesus Christ: New Mutants #98 is now worth a pretty penny

http://m.ebay.com/itm/291313398561?nav=SEARCH

wasn't it worth around that much during Liefeld's heyday?

http://instagram.com/p/uGgXdVj3_7/

I presume New Mutants #98 is that pricey because it was the first appearance of Deadpool? I doubt people wanted it that much before Deadpool became the Wolverine of the new millennium.

It's probably gone up, but there was a time when all of those early Liefeld NM issues were fetching high prices, like the early McFarlanes AMS issues

I don't understand people.

It's probably people expecting the comic to rocket in value after the deadpool movie comes out, like guardians of the galaxy made those issues scarce

i think i have a copy of that somewhere. never thought i'd have the chance to make some liefeld-related cash this far into the 21st century...

Those Liefeld New Mutants issues used to be 'hot' because they introduced Cable, who quickly got his own comic off the back of them.

Yeah, I remember cashing in bitd on New Mutants 87-90.

As a lad I bought what I later realized was a reprint of NM 87 for two bucks, hands shaking, thinking I was really getting away with something. #98 was always hot too IIRC... Deadpool wasn't as big a deal in the 90s as he was in the 2000s but he was inexplicably big. Versus the first appearance of Krule or G.W. Bridge or whoever.

oh, GW Bridge.

I clown on Liefeld, but I not only bought but bought/sold/rebought his NM/X-Force stuff, so I guess the clown's on me.

OMG, this guy is doing bible stories right now
https://instagram.com/p/0VZimLD31R/
http://robliefeldcreations.com/eve-and-the-garden-of-eden-strange-bible-stories-and-rob-liefeld/

really, really good idea

http://robliefeldcreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/EVE_serpent_V04_200dpi_PB.jpg
this is driving me nuts: i'm almost POSITIVE the serpent here is a swipe but i can't place it. Kubert's Bible too obvious?

Wally Wood? It's just real familiar.

Frazetta? Corben? Veitch?

my love affair with comics began with the heroes of the Old Testament. Samson, David, Joshua, these guys really turned my crank.

amazing

that looks like a screenshot from a video game

Yeah, there's a weird lack of depth in that pic, I can't quite figure out what's causing it. The shading and perspective seems to be done reasonably well, at least when you consider that this is Liefeld.

well, it's patrick blaine and mike capprotti over liefeld's pencil roughs - i think we can give them credit for anything positive about it

like, there's no way the chest on that guy, which appears to have fairly normal proportions, was originally sketched out like that

i kinda wish he'd gone full liefeld on these stories and had adam and eve grimacing and festooned with pouches

And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves pouches.

Feet almost competent in the snake picture.

xp haha!

Eve has feet! Do you think God took them when he cast her out of Eden?

The art will be provided by a variety of illustrators working over my pencils, layouts and storytelling.

I'm guessing that since he's hiring people who can actually draw, including feet, his work is at stick-figure level now.

Frazetta? Corben? Veitch?

http://files1.comics.org//img/gcd/covers_by_id/198/w400/198687.jpg

http://www.comics.org/issue/217258/cover/4/

Naw, something closer to this actual pose. Liefeld is not capable of mentally re-arranging objects into different positions or imagining what they would look like from different perspectives. I wanted to say it was video game box cover art but I can't place what. Also note the suspicious dust kicked up where the snake meets the ground, obscuring any mis-matches, as if he couldn't even just sketch in the outline of a snake for chrissakes.

I thought it might be the golden snake in Conan #24, Barry Smith's last issue, but I checked and none of the poses are quite right.

I don't think it's a rip, but that might have been what forks was thinking of re Veitch.

probably a rip of something liefeld saw airbrushed on the side of a van

it's definitely a specific image that he lifted for the roughs and gave as reference because it's pretty dead-on in my memory. wood/corben/veitch/kubert/frazetta listed because it matches their styles, but it could easily have been an album cover, book illustration or video game ad.

maybe something taking place in the savage land?

This thread started a really dumb joke brewing in my head about Liefeld's inability to draw a kangaroo. Just guess the punchline.

Joey Kubert

A: Because it only has one pouch. Although I would also accept 'Because it has feet'.

HEYO

A: Because it only has one pouch.

Sexist.

http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1184992/CABLE_DEADPOOL_03_Rob_Liefeld.jpg

The impossible position of Cable's gun-arm gets stranger the more you look at it. It's positively Escher-esque.

did deadpool chew open his own mask so he could clench a knife between his teeth or what

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--kjXcmmzi--/c_fit,fl_progressive,q_80,w_320/duhv2jp22dhp6oftfhtx.png

That's one of the better Liefeld drawings I've seen.

and its still rotten

Have been told by a reliable source that during his time on New Mutants Liefeld received considerable advice from a well-established and respected comic book artist, particularly to do with perspective.

advice which liefeld clearly only partially understood

That was almost exactly the punchline to the anecdote I heard

heh!

Cable's body length waaaay to short in that pic. Waitamminit, why am I expecting Liefeld to draw someone properly?

he also appears to have a bagel and several small baguettes strapped his waist

we should start a kickstarter to send him to the kubert school or another drawing program

he's only 47! there's still time.

I pretty much avoided every Marvel comic that wasn't Hulk or X-Factor in the early 90s - can anyone explain to me what Liefeld's appeal *was*, exactly? I mean, obviously his stuff looks ridiculous now - but it kind of looked ridiculous in 1991 too. Were the triangle breasts and pouches really enough to compensate for the terrible writing?

Which is to say, there a lot of popular things I don't like -- The Waking Dead, say -- but I understand their appeal. I just don't get what Liefeld's appeal was (other than maybe DC's concurrent stuff was kind of too square or too adult).

everything was super badass and was targeted directly at 12 year old boys

i guess the only answer to that is 'yes', although in retrospect the reasons why that might have been are unfathomable.

Cable is a half-cyborg time-travelling warrior who teaches teens how to kill bad guys

I thought Liefeld was pretty sweet in the early 90s if I'm being honest. I was born in 78 if that's a clue to why.

also used his future knowledge to invest heavily in the lucrative pouch and shoulder-pad industries xp

i was born in 80 and spent a lot of time and money on liefeld comics when i was 12. it really is one of the most baffling life choices i've ever made

I think his appeal had a great deal to do with who and what he was - a young guy who wasn't that much older than his readership, drawing in a fashionably noodly/detailed style that was actually fairly easy to copy/ripoff. You could look at Liefeld's work and imagine doing something pretty similar yourself, and thereby enjoy some of the same fame and income.

One of the theories I've heard floated around about Liefeld's popularity is the "hey, that looks like something I could've drawn!" factor. Which I'm not sure I fully understand but I guess I get why some people would be drawn to that. I got into X-Force at the time because that was the era of my burgeoning intrest in X-stuff in general, but I don't really remember being a particular fan of Liefeld. His characters were pretty easy to draw, though, so I'll give him that.

xpost!

I was born in '78 too. I did buy two copies of the polybagged X Force 1, but it might as well have been one those Spanish CBRs I accidentally download.

I think "super badass and directed at 12-year-olds" is probly good enough.

One of the first X-Men comics I bought on the newsstand as a kid was part of the "X-cutioner's Song" (oh god) crossover, and it featured Cable and Bishop, two men with giant torsos that shopped at the same giant gun store, killing stuff with Wolverine. On the moon.

he was like the sequential art equivalent of dubstep

^^^born in '70, stopped reading superhero comics forever in the wake of this shit

i remember that issue (in fact, i think i still have in a longbox in my parents' loft). your summary of it is infinitely more entertaining than the real thing. xp

it was completely incoherent and all the dialogue made you think something really important was happening, but I had no idea what was happening

You know it does sound more exciting than some of the stuff I was reading at the time, such as the JLI's exciting adventures with the Conglomerate, and the G'nort miniseries

I'm still chagrined that we never learned what the Cutioner was up to before he became an X-Cutioner.

I actually dug X-Force as it went along and after Liefeld left. Nicieza did some decent work on that book, particularly with the expansion of Cable's backstory.

had to read that post three times to make sure it wasn't by DJP
:)

Thank you for the compliment. DJP has good X-tastes, iirc.

Ha, I thought the same thing.

many xps I always felt Liefeld's appeal lay in the fact he was the Creed to Arthur Adams/Todd MacFarlane's Pearl Jam? (nb I think I stopped reading comics just before Liefeld's rise)

No no, Trent Kaniuga was the Creed to Todd MacFarlane's Spawn.

(Dear god, why do I have knowledge of these things...)

liefeld's heavily pass/agg commentary on that facebook post makes it very clear he wanted a producer / advisor credit for the to-be-announced film and they were like, nah we're good

i was 11 or 12 in liefeld's heyday and was pretty into his new mutants run... by the time Youngblood came out I was making fun of him though.

My mate who hasn't really read comics since he was a teenager was really surprised one time when I told him Liefeld was actually shit.

i don't know why i remember this but x-cutioner's song is actually post-liefeld

and man, if they have any sense at all, the new mutants movie will just be a harry potter type deal, the wonderful world of your friends at mutant school, and stay many many miles away from Cable

For me, his poor panel-to-panel storytelling is much more of a distraction than the hideous art. But I'm guessing it's more about the badass moments than the connective tissue between the badass moments. Is there a good example of a batshit Liefeld cliffhanger?

I've read a lot more Marvel in the past 3-4 years than ever before, but haven't come across any Cable or Bishop comics, or even appearances in other comics.

Yes, X-Cutioner's Song took place during Greg Capullo's run on the title. Huge surge in the quality of the art in a very short time.

Batshit Liefeld cliffhanger...Cannonball being killed by Sauron, maybe?

Chuck, I would highly recommend Duane Sweirczynski's recent Cable series, which also features Bishop. It's a pretty great showcase for both characters that requires very little knowledge of either character's labyrinthine backstory. One of my favorite X-books of the past decade.

http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1185286/youngblood_v1_008_03_04_rougher.jpg%3F_ga%3D1.112214019.602674086.1431618780

Hoo boy. This is it. This is the mother lode. The perfect storm of every Rob Liefeld criticism all sitting there in a jumble of tumorous musculature. You've got the tiny feet, the hidden feet, the people balancing on their tiptoes because drawing is hard, the awkward "chest-and-ass thrust out as hard as possible in opposite directions at all times" poses, the inconsistent perspective and sizing where everyone is either twenty feet tall or five feet tall or the entirety of reality is in flux oh my god what is happening I can't feel my face.

The real crux of this piece, of course, is "Troll." Liefeld took Wolverine's head and slapped it on Puck's body and then gave him hooves and filled him full of horse steroids and gave him a uniform that bunches up like crazy around his dick for some reason. Troll is supposed to be holding a helmet under his arm in the first panel, but the only reason you know that is because I just told you. If I hadn't told you that, you would assume the gold area under his arm is just part of his costume and that his arm terminates suddenly in a near-90-degree angle. I know I'm weird, but when I have one arm bent in toward my body and the other arm hanging by my side, they're not the same length.

See the lady standing on tiptoe for no reason? Her name is Psilence. PSILENCE. No further comment is needed. PSILENCE.

Please take a moment to enlarge this so you can check out Shaft (guy in background, in red, to the left of PSILENCE). His top half and bottom half are stuck together at opposing angles. Check out how his legs sort of trail nebulously off behind the foreground bench. And where Liefeld couldn't avoid it: one tiny foot.

The only things keeping this from being the perfect Liefeld drawing are 1. woeful lack of pouches and 2. only six of the nine characters shown have shit strapped to their backs.

aw, here go:
http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1185286/youngblood_v1_008_03_04_rougher.jpg?_ga=1.83267345.602674086.1431618780

Ok, I will check that, thanks Lunch!

No problem!

I invented characters just as awful and shamefully rip-off-ish as Troll and Psilence when I was fourteen. But I was fourteen.

I've read a lot more Marvel in the past 3-4 years than ever before, but haven't come across any Cable or Bishop comics, or even appearances in other comics.

had to read that post three times to make sure it wasn't by DJP

I did too, tbh

If you genuinely want to know...

https://mercurialblonde.wordpress.com/tag/rob-liefeld/
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2011/01/best-online-comics-2010-kibbitzing/

I haven't read the first one but the descriptions in the second link are pretty good.

Personally I liked Liefeld as a kid/young teen and its difficult to explain why, I was attracted to a lot of things that I don't think I enjoyed all that much. I actually still like some of those images in the links on a certain level and it's sort of to do with the mixture of awkwardness, extremity and energy.

I don't think he's even close to being the worst. There's lots of comic artists who are bad at drawing technically but aren't nearly as distinct as Liefeld, they blandly follow whatever the current trends are and then get forgotten.

If Liefeld could draw really well yet had the same fixations he'd look something like Claudio Castellini, Mark Beachum and a Philippine artist who worked at Continuity whose name I can't recall.

we should start a kickstarter to send him to the kubert school or another drawing program

he's only 47! there's still time.

how soon you forget his interview with Hart Fisher

he's got piles of life drawings he could pull out right now that would blow your mind!

http://www.comics.org/issue/1140707/cover/4/

http://www.comics.org/issue/576994/cover/4/

Two drawings from looking at real people.

An illustrator once told me that the Kubert school used Liefeld comics in a study of how NOT to do comics.

His art is awful and the storytelling inept, but there was a crazy dynamism to his art that jazzed a lot of people up at the time.

Two drawings from looking at real people.

100% certain that Barack Obama and that swimsuit model sat for him, yeah

Real people who were in photos obviously.

But isn't crazy to imagine he could pay models to pose, it's not unheard of for comic artists to do that. I don't want to be too presumptuous but I could easier imagine him doing that than doing his life drawings at the local art classes and just drawing whatever sort of person turns up.
But I would guess it was from a photo.

the interview made it very clear that this supposed life drawings were something completely separate from his comics work, and that nobody had publicly seen them

given it's been fifteen years or more and Liefeld has not managed to produce them, he must have filed them on the same high shelf with Rick Veitch's art that he can't return because he'd get injured reaching for it

because they definitely are real and do exist obv

Bottom Glory cover definitely the worst, looks like Ian Churchill pencils?

I do agree with Robert's faint praise above - at least Liefeld's klutzy dynamism is distinctively his own, whereas Churchill is just boring. Has he ever drawn a well-written comic by an actual okay writer?

(Liefeld, that is.)

Okay, I found an actually okay Liefeld panel! From the Captain America heroes reborn series. The rest of the comic is atrocious but this is a pretty good final page reveal. Whether it's creepy on purpose or creepy by accident, I'll leave to you. And off course skulls don't have eyebrows but whatevs

http://i.imgur.com/GajnAmQl.jpg

I think Churchill was also quite easy to spot. He had a habit of drawing gums like no other artist of that type.

http://www.comics.org/series/53363/covers/
http://www.comics.org/series/28904/covers/
http://www.comics.org/series/53362/covers/

Has he ever drawn a well-written comic by an actual okay writer?

he drew a bit of alan moore's well-regarded run on supreme iirc

Has he ever drawn a well-written comic by an actual okay writer?

Alan Moore wrote a superhero murder mystery for Liefeld, in which Liefeld couldn't be bothered to draw the clues, so the reader couldn't solve it

haha, for real? amazing

There's an interview with Moore on youtube from around his Image days and he said the one thing he liked about the 90s mainstream artists more than the alternative comics of the time is that there was more of a visible joy about drawing.

...found it. I doubt he'd stand by all these compliments to Image artists.

https://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=D8Jp3q8SwiU
https://m.youtube.com/?#/watch?v=2ONRqhJH5yE

just remembered: it was a three-part series called Judgment Day, which Liefeld released (he was publishing as Awesome Comics at this point) as a two-part miniseries numbered #α and #Ω, and a followup called Judgment Day: Final Judgment, which idiosyncrasy also didn't help in following it.

i have those issues. they're mostly incomprehensible

I can't find it but there was a Comics Journal article about the foundation of Image and it talked about the Image founders big breakup meeting with Marvel, that Liefeld left the meeting early and McFarlane said something like "he couldn't even stick around for the most important day of his life."

That was a multi-part series by Michael Dean that ran on the website (and not in the magazine iirc) fifteen years ago, & was lost several site redesigns ago.

Would like to read that

I was born in 1979, so I guess was in the exact age group Liefeld was supposed to appeal to in the early 90s, but even back then I found his comics pretty daft. Having grown up on Euro comics like Tintin, I'd always preferred a cleaner line, so the overt cross-hatching and the million uncessary lines looked kinda ugly to me. Back then, I remember thinking Art Adams did it well enough, and Jim Lee was okay too, but McFarlane was already starting to take it too far, and then Liefeld came around, and to me at least he looked like McFarlane clone, except that he was clearly worse, even at 13 I could see that.

I pretty much quit reading superhero comics at that age, around the time Liefeld's X-Force was running, though that was more because of the plots than the art: they were starting to get more stupid and gory and edgy, and I'd always like the more idealistic type of superhero stories, the Avengers' cosmic adventures and Claremontian moral allegories. For most of the 90s I was reading Vertigo and manga and European comics and American indie stuff, I didn't come back to superheroes until the early 00s. It's impossible for to me understand the appeal of all that "extreme" 90s stuff, since I missed reading it when I was an actual teen, and I don't think it makes much sense to an adult.

Worth noting that American culture was pretty militarized at the time -- while Liefeld was doing his giant guns and pouches thing, the US was getting involved in Kuwait and Iraq.

Not that it's not always militarized, but....

CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES, THIS IS MY LAST RESORT

I mean, angst/violence/gore/boobs will always find a market for teen boys (self-included)

I remember thinking Art Adams did it well enough

Yeah, Art Adams clearly the best from this milieu.

Art Adams' stuff was more joyful and also more steeped in comics history than Liefeld's has ever seemed to me.

Plus he can draw and is good at composition.

I only like Adams when he's really indulging, like in Jonni Future and all his monster sketchbooks. But most of his superhero stuff does nothing for me. Not enough facial variety either.

I was a huge fan of McFarlane as a kid. In retrospect, some of his anatomy was terrible (there's a Spiderman image that has some of the most atrocious anatomy I've ever seen that I can't find on the internet, it makes his pelvis look twice as wide as it should) but I still think his stylization of Spiderman with all the crazy contorted poses and detailed webbing that was more arched ( most artists drew the webs more square) was really good, his faces were quite distinct and I quite like the grotesque underworlds he could do. His Batman was not bad either.
His art got lazier and he seems to have lost interest in drawing (he rarely pencils since the mid 90s) but I think he could have been a good artist if he had more passion for it and could improve his anatomy.

Used to be a big Erik Larsen fan and I still have respect for him. While his anatomy and storytelling skills have got better I think his drawing has lost its personality and gusto. His mannerisms inherited from Kirby, Bill Watterson and CC Beck have taken over just too much.

I like Kelley Jones and Sam Kieth. But I was looking at a lot of Jones comics this week and most of them were too stylistically uneven and far too decorative to tell the stories properly. I don't think he's that well suited to comics, he's constantly incorporating illustrative designs and not getting enough flow going.

Still have a soft spot for Steven Hughes and Tim Vigil.

Leinil Francis Yu is quite talented too.
http://leinilyu.deviantart.com/art/life-is-like-a-box-of-49807363

Couldn't love most of these artists though.

As much as I don't care for most of the mainstream artists who get ridiculed for bad anatomy and bad technical skills, I get quite tired of it because it seems unfair how people just pick on modern "hot" artists.

Kirby and Gene Colan, both brilliant artists have done quite a bunch of wonky drawings that doesn't even work within their stylization that does accommodate lots of wonkiness pleasantly.
Fuseli and William Blake are two of my favourite fine artists but some of their drawings also take bad anatomy past the point their style allows for.

I think this is also true for a lot of alternative comics, there's a lot of bad drawing, even from good artists that never gets called out. Maybe people feel less easy about mocking this stuff because the alternative comics online community is quite a small world or they feel too insecure to make fun of "arty" stuff.

Perhaps since most mainstream artists pick a straightforward style, violating anatomy rules sticks out more. But even then, I think in a lot of instances of people criticizing their female anatomy, I think these critics sometimes get it wrong because they don't know anatomy as well as they think they do.
Sometimes these artists use a level of exaggeration and distortion that I think works well enough but other people think is unintentional and bad drawing.

http://comicbook.com/2015/11/10/deadpool-bad-blood-rob-liefeld/

https://www.newsarama.com/44784-rob-liefeld-frames-major-x-as-his-greatest-marvel-hits-all-in-one-place.html

Major X's right arm, in the Major X #2 cover - ack. And plotting-wise, he comes from the X-istence? Hokay...

Picturing Major and Adam slumped over beers in a bar, ten years from now, complaining about their poor reception.

One of the many reasons I'm hopeful for an MCU X-Men is we won't be seeing the filmmakers intentionally cram in as many Xs as they can into the film. Can't remember if that was Singer's X-Men 2 or Ratner's Last Stand - thinking Ratner?

X-actly, x-actly. X-cellent point-x.

"We’ve done a really good job at hiding our antagonist. You don’t even meet him until #2," said Liefeld.

Hint: he's hiding somewhere behind all the crosshatching.

Major X's right arm, in the Major X #2 cover - ack

lol at the implication that any of his other anatomy is fine

also lol at the cover apparently being designed in Word

he plans his sentences as well as his drawings

"One of my buddies I let him read all six scripts, and he’s like I like all the callbacks." Liefeld said.

"The first characters from Marvel that I had a chance to do was with Louise Simonson, who my first New Mutants was drawing an annual with her.” Liefeld continued. "My editor did not know this, he read them and he couldn’t wait to see the designs with them. I said you can they’re in the New Mutants Annual in 1989. You should go get that. You should go look at it. They are all over it."

“But it’s just a thrill for everyone to see Whilce Portacio in #3. It’s like career, best work. Brent Peeples stepped up to not only do two but three issues of the series. [...] I called Will asked if he could rough up the place again with me like we did back in the 90’s. They approved."

Conversations that humans have:

“It worked out well for me when two weeks ago a bunch of my family members called me, and said, “have you clicked on the Walt Disney home page?” There he is center page. There’s Deadpool right next to Mickey Mouse. Then you go, 'Oh crap this is real.' I am very proud that Deadpool and his family cleared the high hurtle."

SAID THE WRITER

"Oh I have plans, but that is in the fans hands. I’m content that we got to tell this story," said the writer/artist. "There are at least two more big arcs. I think you’ll see them at the end everywhere this can go. I’m just really excited to get it out there."

Dude still draws guns like they were stuck in characters' hands as an afterthought (barrel/stock disjointed at weird angles).

of course the guy should have kept working at his craft!

any minute now, he's going to break out those life drawings that he told Hart Fisher would blow Fisher's mind. that was only, what, eleven years ago?

― more funny and original than, 'ow you say, a penis (sic), Wednesday, August 12, 2009 1:30 PM (nine years ago)

xp To match the dislocated elbow joints, you see.

No one will ever be able to convince me that Rob Liefeld isn't a surgically-altered golden retriever. No other explanation makes sense.

The enthusiasm? The drawing ability? The sentence structure? It's all so obvious. He might be a lab, but that's as far as I'm willing to bend.

“cleared the high hurtle”

bitter irony to thread title now

because he's holding down a writing job, for which he's even less capable?

i read through the first two issues of major x, they are lol terrible and not even fun in a neal adams way. truly disposable.

I know it's already been done but "I am very proud that Deadpool and his family cleared the high hurtle."

Also I just looked at the cover for Major X #2 and I can't stop giggling

okay:
http://i.imgur.com/eevS3mw.png
http://i.imgur.com/T8pY1NK.png
http://i.imgur.com/BP93i10.png
http://i.imgur.com/z2IKaKe.png

i mean
"CONTACT'S BEEN MADE, SUNSHINE, PREPARE YOURSELF FOR A PAINFUL SEVERANCE!"
"I'M GONNA VOMIT, IT WON'T BE PRETTY."
"THE SCENT IS OFF. AND YOU'RE BIGGER, THICKER"
GHUN!

REMEMBER THE CRIES OF OUR WORLD DYING, FRIEND. USE IT AS A FUEL TO POWER OUR MISSION.

first issue is "written and penciled and inked" by liefeld with two additional inkers, presumably for the feet

what no love for

"I'M ABOUT TO LIGHTEN THE LOAD, MAJOR"

http://i.imgur.com/YnI1e98.png

every panel is DOA, motionless and awkward at the level of mastery of a high school sketchbook smeared with pencil tracings and blackheads

liefeld gives up drawing by issue two so that book is less egregiously sophomoric and more flat out boring. not really much to share there but this is indicative of layout and script:
http://i.imgur.com/RP6g1yl.png

it's kinda weird to see liefeld characters/plots drawn in that more cartoony, allred/mignola/immonen/whoever style. when that stuff came around, IIRC it was basically a breath-of-fresh-air corrective to the dominant 90s strain of high school testosterone sketchbook stuff to which liefeld contributed so much.

ha, I read Mignola and Allred before the Image style became bemusingly prevalent*; Immonen not until Image’s first year.


* in fact the Mignola / Giffen cover and pseudonymous Giffen interiors on Doom Force were my first exposure to the Liefeld style and signature Image Boys brand of visual incoherence

sure sure. but in terms of house style at the big two superhero firms, i mean.

yeah, I get what you mean, just a different experience if you weren't into those house styles

(DC never managed to succumb successfully; even when they did try to make a star out of someone with a completely overblown style like Bart Sears, he was far too competent a cartoonist to really carry the feverish dream non-logic of the Image stars)

I hate so much the way the guy draws faces.

I gotta ask have any of you seen the 1990 film <i>The Ambulance</i>?

Ugh, I gotta remember one of these days that this site uses BBcode.

I made the jump from just picking up newsstand comics to regularly visiting an actual comic shop (actually a used bookseller with a rpg/comics sideline until the 90s comics boom hit) during Liefeld’s Marvel peak and it was just such a weird time. It took a year or two to realize things weren’t meant to be inherently incoherent, there were just too many badly plotted comics widely available

The post-peak newsstand years were just horrible. I should have stuck with Wendy the Good Little Witch until I had access to a full range of comics if I didn’t want to wreck my brain.

nhex, a quick jump around this suggests further (and shared!) investigation might be illuminating!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HsFBV9-umc

I've seen The Ambulance, complete with Stan Lee and Gene Colan cameos. It's not one of Larry Cohen's finest, but perfectly watchable.

i just saw a Larry Cohen memorial screening of this (i think officially it's the first time this movie actually was screened in the NYC area, lol) a few nights ago. if you love over-the-top schlock it's a really good time. Red Buttons!?

the big surprise to me was that was that the main character (Eric Roberts) plays a Marvel Comics artist who seems to blatantly be a version of Liefeld - but who knows, maybe all the young hotshot artists in 1990 dressed and acted that way, giant mullets and pants that are painful to look at

Stan Lee's first film role, I think, and he actually gets several lines playing himself. a more savvy fan could probably mention all the cameos, didn't realize one of them was Gene Colan. think I saw Larry Hama in there?

xps mh: feel like the industry is still not learning. all these companies put out WAY too many books right now. sure some of them are good, but most are mediocre, and who can afford to buy 50-75 books a month from Marvel or DC alone, let alone muster up the interest to pursue them?

I was going to say something about how having a diverse line of comics means many people could buy one or two titles (and get sucked into some crossover titles) that interest them. But, yeah, it's probably more likely the few people buying a shitload of titles that makes up the majority of monthly comic buyers

i try to read everything the big two put out on a semi-regular basis and it's almost completely impossible even when price is no issue. no shade on the people who make it but who the hell needs a west coast avengers book right now? Or Deathstroke fer crissakes.

The cover of Major X #2 makes me so happy.

Anyway #3 is the third issue of Major X to sell out the print run before release, so the comics market if even more crazy than I thought.

https://www.bleedingcool.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/screen-shot-2019-05-13-at-4.51.40-pm.jpg

hahaha

successfully baited.

TBF I think a laser pointer would be enough to successfully bait Rob Liefeld.

Crazy story here: https://www.comicsbeat.com/rob-liefeld-walking-away-from-youngblood/

he mentions having a partner he can work with for other properties so I’m thinking... rob doesn’t own anything, now?

and apparently it was jeph loeb who helped set up the initial deal back in the late 90s? whole lot to consider, here

Very weird that he kept that sale under wraps for THIS long, less that it happened 20 years ago

I feel like there’s a dichotomy of people who casually laugh at Rob’s hijinks and Liefeld super fans and neither group is curious to dig into these things. For completely different reasons, though

he mentions having a partner he can work with for other properties so I’m thinking... rob doesn’t own anything, now?

I assume he at least partly owns all the stuff he says he still owns. And let’s face it, he can come up with new ideas with exactly as much value as the old ones in 15 minutes

It’s definitely lol that Scott m-f Rosenberg was quietly sitting on this all the way through the Drunk Duck and payola eras, only to team up with an incoherent Andrew Rev at this stage. So many layers of fucking creators over & flushing investors’ $ down a burning toilet, smooshed into one unpalatable trifle

he uses the same “partnership”-style language to refer to the arrangement he had with Rosenberg and the other guy who has his other properties. I’d say that for his sake I hope he does still have some ownership, but I have no idea what kind of payout he got on the other ones!

Like, what if Liefeld mysteriously got a million bucks for Badrock alone and a generous fee to pitch movies for twenty years? Sounds decent

for his sake I hope

he stole art from freelancers & physically assaulted employees, and is still verbally abusive when ppl he had wronged are brought up decades later. cry him no tears.

eh I didn’t imply unlimited empathy for his stock

Like, what if Liefeld mysteriously got a million bucks for Badrock alone and a generous fee to pitch movies for twenty years? Sounds decent

he sold Shrink! for the second time for a million bucks this year

do I want to google to see what that is? probably not, but here we go

holding my head in my hands now, depressed that I've been reminded of something I definitely blocked from my memory

Imagine having a spare million dollars and then saying to yourself, I can think of no better use for this spare million dollars than to purchase the rights to a Rob Liefeld property. Preferably one that even people who are semi-familiar with the work of Rob Liefeld have never heard of.

Hi Rob, if by chance you have on your person a random doodle you did while on the toilet, I have a blank check and very poor judgment.

Rob Liefeld's "Random Toilet Doodle #001" (soliciting for publication October 2019, Direct-to-Video Movie out on February 2020, actual publication date April 2023)

Preferably one that even people who are semi-familiar with the work of Rob Liefeld have never heard of

Shrink! was literally five single-panel cartoons. The reportage on the second rights deal referred to this as a “story” and a “webcomic”.

Wow.

It just occurred to me...is this all stemming from his 'creation' of Deadpool (wherein he slapped a barely-repurposed Spider-Man costume on a character who subsequent creators then had to breathe some semblance of personality into)?

for those who need reminding of Shrink!, that million-dollar "story" of a superhero psychiatric therapist in full:

http://robliefeldcreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/shrink3.jpg

http://robliefeldcreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/shrink2.jpg

http://robliefeldcreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/shrink4.jpg

http://robliefeldcreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/shrink5.jpg

http://robliefeldcreations.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/shrink6.jpg

18 years, two movie deals, and he's never even bothered to fix the typos.

The contents of my high school notebook margins were more effortful than this.

i like how by the last one the therapist is wearing a ... crop-top ... off-shoulder ... tank-top?

deadpool is entirely the reason anyone from hollywood gives two shits about liefeld. success breeds attention.
"shrink" strikes me like a movie pitch for a superhero psychologist ("it's sopranos meets the avengers!") and someone wants "From the Guy Who Brought You Deadpool" for the movie poster.
it's a sad old world.

deadpool is entirely the reason anyone from hollywood gives two shits about liefeld. success breeds attention.

why did Hollywood give so much of a shit about Deadpool in 2002? was Lopez mad that it was doing so badly that the Gail Simone run got cancelled and replaced with Agent X?

i feel good about not knowing that anyone in hollywood cared about deadpool in 2002
the character is terrible imo, just a murdery brodown howard the duck.

Jennifer Lopez bought and was intending to star in Shrink! in 2002.

(Deadpool is definitely repugnant.)

ya oldsters

anyway, and i say this as a compliment, Joe Kelly deserves most of the credit for turning Deadpool from a = Deathstroke-ripoff to the fourth wall-breaking Spider-Man with a goofy cast of characters

Deadpool has been given more interesting facets over the years but not interesting enough to actively elicit my actual interest. Like it's the one Marvel character I don't make any effort to keep up with.

I assume he at least partly owns all the stuff he says he still owns. And let’s face it, he can come up with new ideas with exactly as much value as the old ones in 15 minutes

remember when Liefeld justified taking a series that Loeb and Ian Churchill created away from Churchill
and licensing it to a publisher trying to rebuild his line after many creators had walked, including the entirety of an imprint under a salaried (?) editor
because said publisher had been exposed for ripping off artists by claiming that their work was substandard and therefore not paying for it
but publishing it anyway
and then threatening on the internet to sue people who talked about it

and Liefeld's justification was that Churchill had slowed down and wasn't following Liefeld's editorial direction
...out of resentment that Liefeld had stolen his original art...

and part of Rob's explanation on a fan board was

Awesome has a vast library of over 500 characters, we cannot and would not choose to publish all of our titles in the current tumultuous marketplace. Do not kid yourself, the industry is suffering terribly! The honest members of the big 2 companies will concede that this is a trying time for publishers. The numbers continue to sink.

#allegedly #iirc

https://www.bleedingcool.com/2019/07/05/william-messner-loebs-comics-kiss-the-end-3/
good to see him working but does he have a home?

remember when Liefeld

honestly, my knowledge is based on less-than-half-remembered Wizard magazine articles from 1995, articles about the number of pouches he’s drawn, and the occasional anecdote on ilx

the truly shitheaded moves are bad, the absolute consistency in being a deluded loon are funny

hey I guess Churchill finally got his art back from Rob (recently?) sometime in the last 18 years

The Coven: Issue 1, Pages 2-3
Pencils: Ian Churchill
Inks: Norm Rapmund
Media Type: Art Board
Detail: Cane bashes Abel over the head

dammit the exclamation mark fell off

Detail: Cane bashes Abel over the head!

Those “Shrink!” panels make me feel embarrassed to have ever read a comic book.

in 2012, 562 backers pledged $35,343 to help Rob give a free copy of the new Brigade #1 to 100,000 people by October 2013

every single comic that BACKERS and PLEDGES receive will come with a FOIL STAMPED BRIGADE LOGO! Yes, EVERY COPY! Shiny is always better, at least in my house and this will cement YOUR comics that YOU created via this pledge with a signature FOIL LOGO.

on June 8, 2019, Rob updated:

Delayed cover uploading shortly. Book on track to become the single biggest and most important of my career. Period

Only a true wordsmith could conjure up the metaphor of "cementing" a cover with a shiny logo.

as of two days ago, Rob is now "redrawing" this book that ppl gave him thousands of dollars for seven years ago, to remove the characters that he accidentally forgot he doesn't own

what a tragic and unforeseeable delay to this series which he absolutely definitely has completed, with presumably 68 subsequent monthly issues ready to roll out on the regular just as soon as he gets that first giveaway relaunch #1 out, which he IN NO WAY has failed to complete in the year's lead time he gave himself, or in the subsequent six.

Awesome has a vast library of over 500 characters

nb that in Shrink!, he ran out of ideas for superheroes after four, and just put a regular snowman in the fifth

also that fully half of the superheroes were called Mr. [Something]. golden age vibes or golden retriever brain? u-decide

could be 3/4, I’m just guessing he never actually came up with a name for the human torch guy. absolutely cannot rule out Mr Not Human Torch though

It seems like you dislike this man

never met him

Rob's got a fake interview in the back of Major X #0 where he talks about how it's the most important and biggest of his career and was an idea he had when he was at Marvel the first time and they begged him to come back and do it.

It's a truly awful series, but despite stiff competition the art is by far the worst thing about it - full of static poses, brokeback and crotch shots for starters alongside Rob's well documented inability to draw feet, perspective or anyone holding nothing correctly, but the muscle definition is especially hysterical.

It's honestly been somewhat impressive over the past three decades to watch someone so assiduously resist growth + improvement in their chosen creative field.

Like how hard would it have been to set aside a cumulative hour or two to really look at a foot.

Ah, but...

Following the April 2012 release of DC Comics' solicitations for that July, which included Liefeld's covers for The Savage Hawkman #11, Deathstroke #11, and Grifter #11—all of which showed characters' feet—Liefeld, who had been criticized for avoiding drawing characters' feet, commented, "The Hipsters don't know what to do when I draw feet. It confuses them."[106]

“The Hipsters don’t know what to do when I draw feet,” and other totally normal things to say.

The Hipsters will continue doing what they've always done, Rob: neither know nor care about your existence.

Or is that just his random catch-all term for people who acknowledge his absence of talent

“The Hipsters don’t know what to do when I draw feet,”

new board description plz

what other four-decade veteran of the comics industry could make an event out of rendering anatomy for the first time

he really is comics’ own trump

Brokeback Crotchshots, in theaters May 2021

Rob is now "redrawing" this book that ppl gave him thousands of dollars for seven years ago, to remove the characters that he accidentally forgot he doesn't own

I'm, picturing him with a giant eraser going at his pages and it's making me giggle

“The Hipsters don’t know what to do when I draw feet” is some amazingly funny "I'm triggering the haters" dialogue and I agree it's board worthy

I'm picturing him with a giant eraser going at his pages and then redrawing the exact same inept figure he drew seven years before.

but with different pouches

different more

Why has he never just created a character like The Pouch, with every inch of human anatomy obscured by countless pouches? Play to your strengths, Rob!

I mean, he kind of has, multiple times over

ha, i know y'all hipsters out there used to watching me.... but don't watch me... watch my feet

I'm Drawing As Fast As I Can

(The Rob Liefeld Story)

POST FEET SWEATIE

the hipsters have lots of pouches these days, so we're really in a Liefeld or post-Liefeld world

i haven't seen any giant ponytails emerging straight out of the top of otherwise shaved heads, but we are moving back to bushwick in a few weeks so i will keep y'all posted

kudos doc casino on the footwork reference

Why has he never just created a character like The Pouch, with every inch of human anatomy obscured by countless pouches? Play to your strengths, Rob!

why must you constantly underestimate this man

I love that the pouch gun is firing... a pouch

that literally is the best Liefeld drawing I've ever seen

Agreed - tho the intersection of gun & left hand still isn't quite right.

that literally is the best Liefeld drawing I've ever seen

OMG, I...I honestly thought I was just being a wisenheimer.

It's simultaneously his best and most self-aware drawing ever.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLFNU_-K54M
Only watched bits of it but was amused by Liefeld saying "you can have a sword and a gun!" reminding me of an image Sic posted above. He does an impression of Alan Moore talking about Pulp Fiction and a bit about Stephen Platt hating him now.

Liefeld memoir Robservations forthcoming. Or, y'know, at least like the first two chapters and then maybe a third chapter seven years from now.

God help me but I think I need to read this POS.

a+++++++++ title, quite possibly there are not enough plus signs in all of math to convey how stupid/roflmao/stupid that title is. like he's been jealously guarding this brilliant little nugget since elementary school and he's finally ready to share it with the world. bless that fucking dork.

ROBSERVATIONS

Lock human culture

I've Got My Own Autobiography To Do

https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cfy5rgqvohpdqxgu2geb5u2b/bafkreiacz7kuke6nsslizut5nd42qntwlwrcf4ndimjvvhevyp5w74gvwq@jpeg

something very Liefeld-esque about Elon's physique here

100%, amazing call

Looks like the pool kids sucking in their guts when Lacey walks by in Caddyshack.

i hesitate to post it but there is actually another such life-imitates-liefeld photo with moosk in swim jorts.