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

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.