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

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.