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Underground > Comic Books >

the liefeld column

05:29 / 07.07.01

okay, in summary -- "here are some artists liefeld likes... oh, and isn't quesada a stupid doo-doo head?"

you know, i really try not to jump on any "lets bash ___ " bandwagons. i can honestly say i have seen potential in liefeld's work, even if he has turned out to be, in my opinion, the laziest comic artist i've seen actually get published.

now i really think he deserves all the flak he has gotten. what's with this arrogant (is that the right word, or is it "ignorant" (or is it "moronic")) little shit? encouraging up-and-coming artists is a good thing, but notice how those he lists seem to be significantly influenced by the old liefeld style. "this copiel guy uses lots of scratchy lines-- now that's drawing!" jesus christ...

and he brings up greg horn and refers to his work as "captivating"... i don't deny this guy has great technical skill, but what i've seen of his work is so damn bland. like alex ross. these guys can do marvelously photo-realistic paintings that have absolutely no impact -- no drama, no energy, poor composition... that's the great tragedy of so many artists.

i don't want to be too harsh on horn and ross, they're still working and have room to grow. but a lot of recent "hot" artists, like liefeld, are all of a sudden gushed over as soon as they hit the scene, and they seem to decide that this means they are good enough as they are. "i am a Good Artist. therefore the work i do is Good Art." then they get lazy, just churning out the same stuff over and over, never bothering to put in the effort to keep learning, keep growing, and actually becoming interesting artists.

ack.

Ronald Thomas Clontle

12:02 / 07.07.01

I think the big problem with Liefeld is that for that brief window of time in the very early 90s, people kissed his ass left and right because of his popularity on New Mutants and X-Force. Then lots of kids started cloning his style...and I think that on their part, it was a very crass move, because they could cash in without having any ability to draw people with real anatomy, backgrounds, or continuity between panels. That's the real reason so many young artists took to the Image guys...it's easy to fake style without substance.

That Liefeld column just sounded like a Wizard article...and the big reason Wizard runs articles like that is to drum up interest in those creators to get the speculative market rolling, and obviously half of what they do is the price guide. They've been doing it for years...they just hype someone to death and their work starts selling like crazy, and they comment on it as if they had nothing to do with the hype.
Wizard is the MTV of comics in this way...

I think that Wizard and Liefeld are really far off on what they would consider "hot artists", because I don't really think anyone besides the speculative markets cares about those guys.

I agree about Greg Horn, Alex Ross, et al...I think their work is extremely tacky and lame. Isn't photorealism a bad idea considering superheroes look very absurd and stupid that way? All of those Elektra paintings by Horn piss me off, with their overinflated breasts the size of basketballs. They look like they were painted onto the back of leather jackets, or the side of a pickup truck. They are always very tasteless.

Ross is a better draftsman, but his compositions are always godawful, always overcrowded and difficult to read. I think what bothers me the most about a guy like him is how conservative he is, and how he wastes obvious talent doing endless retreads of alternate timeline mainstream heroes.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

02:08 / 08.07.01

Oliver Copiel put out the ugliest comic on the stands in Legion Lost. Liefeld praises him.

He says that Van Scriver is better than Frank Quitely.

He pisses and moans that the EIC at Marvel is not hiring his talentless, overly late and refusing-to-draw-what-the-writer-turned-in ass. Oh, and Rob, maybe you got dropped from Wolvering because you couldn't keep his costume straight panel to panel, changed who he was fighting page to page, and generally couldn't tell a story if Alan Moore left you his notes for one. Oh, wait, he did. And you fucked that up too.

Rob has the credibility of the fake shill for Sony and and should be damn happy he was able to fool a lot of the people for a fairly long length of time. If what he almost did to Kurt Busiek (Hey Kurt, I know I said I wouldn't put your name on stuff you didn't write, but that was before Diamond realized I don't sell 2,000 copies of my own work anymore) wasn't enough to get him consigned to sweeeping up movie theaters, I don't know what will.

And to be honest, Leifeld talking about page composition and anatomy is too funny to be believed.

03:15 / 08.07.01

In defense of alex ross, I don't think his weakness is so much in composition, but rather his color choices. The dude doesn't believe in mixing paint.

03:44 / 08.07.01

I've simply ran out of ways to express my opinion that Leifeld is shit.

03:44 / 08.07.01

Leifeld ?

Isn't he kind of beneath notice, let alone contempt these days?[/LIST]

17:59 / 08.07.01

i actually like copiel. i didn't mean to rag on him, just liefeld's reaction to him. he isn't quite there yet, but he has potential.

22:43 / 08.07.01

quote:Originally posted by Solitaire Rose:
Oliver Copiel put out the ugliest comic on the stands in Legion Lost. Liefeld praises him.

I'll go with Rex on this one. I think Mr Copiel made the legion futuristic again. I don't think his art is ugly anymore than Jae Lee's art could be considered ugly...

And Liefeld should be condemned to death for what he did to the New Mutants. It was the start of that whole explosion of crap that almost destroyed comics, and almost stopped me collecting comics for good.

Lets put a contract out on him!

01:34 / 09.07.01

Where does he write a column?

04:39 / 09.07.01

from the captain america thread:

liefeld's follies

Our Lady of The Two Towers

04:39 / 09.07.01

"Yah boo, Quesada's crap. They should have let Me run Marvel. ME! I gave the company Cable! And... um... Captain America's breasts! You don't understand a true artist!"

08:48 / 16.10.03

In Liefeld's defense, I'd just like to point out that his drawings were always just kind of an extra talent, a secondary mutation if you will. His real talent was and is his writing.

10:30 / 16.10.03

Years ago I applied for Liefeld's post Image post marvel imprint Awesome comics. I was trying to get my submissions noticed by their then editor Jeph Loeb.I always had respect for Rob Liefeld from a long time ago back when the speculator market was blazin hot for Image in the early 90's because he was a young cat like me and he was making moves.I always found his aesthetics pretty humorous,he can't draw feet and hands worth shit so he just makes everybody wear arm bands and chops the feet off so that they look like stumps.lol

Anyway! I was chillin in their swank Century City office waitin for an interview with Jeph via our previous phone conversation
but nobody there could be bothered to even notice me. Then the man himself walked out, big (or should I say lil) Rob strolled past me with another guy mad quick-but---how can I put this

I was close enough to choke him

not that I would have.whatever.Jeph didn't have time to fuck with me that day but he told me meet him in San Diego that year for the Comic Con.I did it-I drove the couple hundred miles south to check for him at their booth and AGAIN! this nigga actin like he ain't even remember me..dam that sucked.

I lost whatever little respect I had for Rob and Jeph at that moment.
Not that what I thought mattered.As far as Alex Ross,I dig his work but yeah-his layouts are pretty crowded.Now that I hear somebody put it that way it almost seems like a gimmick.

*phwew*!

13:59 / 16.10.03

I notice that the first issue of Millar & Leifeld's new YOUNGBLOOD came and went a few weeks ago without any notice or publicity at all, save a Newsarama article done a month before the comics' release. I flipped through it and it looked stupid - all the worst cliches about Millar's writing thrown into one comic ("Look! Superheros giving each other blowjobs! Isn't that cutting edge?!?!") with horrid art. All the variant covers of the first issue are still gathering dust in various comic stores in NYC, and no mention at all of the supposedly upcoming issue 2. I haven't even seen anyone review it, much less cover the 1st issue's debut in any way, shape or form.

15:02 / 16.10.03

Pretty much the definitive word on the subject.

Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo

15:31 / 16.10.03

The reason that there wasn't much notice of the new Youngblood is that it wasn't distributed by Diamond. The "Alias" comic he was doing based on the TV show hasn't shipped either.

Rob is done. He won't shipped by Diamond until he pays his back debt to them, and he is well known for not paying things he doesn't agree with.

16:31 / 16.10.03

Could someone please post a link to the column that isn't broken?

17:41 / 16.10.03

Well, YOUNGBLOOD #1 was in Midtown Comics, NYC's best comic store (and one of the 3 largest comic stores in Manhattan). But I didn't know that about Diamond. Another way in which Liefeld has screwed himself.

18:31 / 16.10.03

Could someone please post a link to the column that isn't broken?

Probably not. Look at the date on the top post of this thread—July, 2001. 27 months ago. That's, like, a geological epoch in Internet years.

21:13 / 06.11.03

I fairly certain that the only good thing Liefeld ever did was give control of most of his characters to Alan Moore. And then he didn't pay him. Alan Fucking Moore. Liefeld could have rode that one till the end of time, but no, he fucks over one of the most famous and great comic writers ever. What a maroon!

Zoom.

15:17 / 07.11.03

Again in Rosses defence theres the thought that he's only ever asked to produce the photo realistic style he made his name with.

If any of the big publishers hire him are they going to take a chance on him producing "out of character" as it were?

And as for Liefeld I just remeber the last issue of "New Mutants" and his blantant rip off of a double page spread from the first issue of "Ronin". Anyone else spot it, right down to the number of panels after the splash image.

17:26 / 07.11.03

Yeah, I spotted it, although in reverse order: I didn't read Ronin till a couple years later, but when I did I immediately said, "A-ha! This is where Rob Liefeld ripped off the bit with Shatterstar in NM100 from."

What's interesting is that even though he swiped the whole thing from Miller, he still fucked it up. In Ronin, that scene is amazingly badass - one where Miller shows us quite how devoted to kicking ass the hero is. In NM100? It's meaningless, because there's no build-up to it. The previous page is utterly unconnected. The guy getting stabbed is some nameless mook. There's no follow through. It's obviously just inserted to tell us that "Shatterstar = BADASS" but it's completely unconvincing.

Interestingly (well, to me) John Byrne did a brilliant rip of Liefeld about a year later where he drew half an issue of She-Hulk lifting panel for panel in composition and style directly from X-Force #3. Meanwhile, the float text was lampooning Nicieza's gritted-teeth style of writing. Pretty cute, and from back in the days when Byrne still had some creative juice left in him.

19:33 / 07.11.03

why is that man still alive.

i'm prety sure that there's a liefeld joke panel somewhere in the invisibles. king mob with HUGE thighs shooting people.

Professor Silly

20:58 / 07.11.03

'tis true--in Volume 1. The whole story arc mimics the style of several different artist from around that time. Another example of Jill Thompson kickin' ass and taking names.

00:20 / 08.11.03

houdini,

Heh. What issue of She-Hulk was that?