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

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