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

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