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

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