Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 01:14, 10 August 2005

Rob Liefeld (born October 3, 1968 in Anaheim, California) is an American comic book writer, illustrator and publisher, who has been one of the Modern Age’s most prominent and most controversial figures. Although briefly a superstar artist in the 1990s, the backlash against his bombastic art style and widely derided writing, his repeated failures to maintain publishing schedules, his contentious ouster from the Image Comics partnership and allegations of plagiarism have eclipsed his early successes. Liefeld and his partisans now flaunt his claim to be as "The Most Hated Man in Comics," a particularly ironic form of self-aggrandizing in light of the frequent accusations of plagiarism: The label is lifted from Jim Steranko's self-promotional materials.

In the early 1990s, Liefeld became a superstar due to his work on Marvel Comics’ The New Mutants, and later X-Force. In 1992 he and other popular Marvel illustrators left the company to found Image Comics, which rode the peak of a wave of comic books owned by their creators rather than their publishers. Liefeld’s high-profile line of comics failed to gain much critical approval.

Fans originally praised Liefeld’s artwork as energetic and action-packed, but his later work was regularly criticized for excessive flamboyance, limited versatility, arbitrary use of cross-hatching, and stiff, contrived anatomy ranging from the improbable to the impossible. Liefeld's original creations, like many Image properties, have been panned as two-dimensional and generic.

Most observers agree that overly flashy artwork and decreased focus on character development were widespread trends in mainstream comic books in the early 1990s. For this reason, some consider Liefeld merely the most vilified representative of an industry-wide fad. But few deny that Liefeld's lines of comics were marked at that time by rather simplistic writing, that his characters and conceptions were often painfully derivative, and that his undependable and unpredictable publishing schedules quickly alienated both retailers and consumers.

Career

In 1988, at the age of 20, Liefeld completed his first significant published work, pencils for a mini-series featuring the superhero pair Hawk and Dove for DC Comics. After disputes with his collaborators at DC, he moved to Marvel, where in 1989 he became the regular illustrator of The New Mutants (starting with issue #86), starring a junior team of X-Men. The popularity of Liefeld's art soon allowed him to increasingly take control of the series' story. He is often credited with creating a new leader for the team, the heavily-muscled, heavily-armed, glowing-eyed cyborg Cable, who instantly became a popular anti-hero; however, the prototype for Cable, tentatively named "Commander X," was initially devised by Marvel editorial staff, with Liefeld developing character designs from the assigned script.

Liefeld also created the wise-cracking assassin Deadpool and a group of immortal mutants called the Externals. Both were popular, but prompted Liefeld's first charges of plagiarism, as fans debated similarities between Deadpool and DC's Deathstroke the Terminator and between the Externals and the immortals from Highlander.

With The New Mutants #98, Liefeld assumed full creative control over the book, pencilling, inking, and plotting, with Fabian Nicieza writing dialogue. He then transformed The New Mutants into the platoon-like X-Force. The 1991 debut issue of X-Force sold four million copies, an industry-wide record soon broken by X-Men #1, illustrated by Jim Lee. In both cases, variant editions were used to sell multiple issues to single collectors; but where X-Men used multiple variant covers, X-Force relied on multiple variant trading cards polybagged with the comic itself.

Liefeld's relationship with Marvel began to break down in 1991, when he annouced plans to publish an original title, dubbed "The X-Ternals," with competitor Malibu Comics. Faced with the loss of his Marvel work, and with the threat of trademark litigation blocking his new project, Liefeld scrapped the title and incorporated the "Externals" into his X-Force continuity.

Liefeld, along with other young, popular artists, (including Lee) left Marvel in 1992 to form Image Comics, in a migration dubbed by some as "the X-Odus", since many of these artists had worked on X-Men related titles for Marvel). Liefeld's superhero team series Youngblood was the first Image comic to hit the shelves and contained many elements that became Image stereotypes: huge muscles, huge breasts, huge guns and plentiful violence.

Afterwards, Liefeld established two publishing houses: Extreme Studios, which was part of the Image business structure and Maximum Press, independent of Image. Once he became a publisher, Liefeld illustrated comic books infrequently and books that he was responcible for drawing were repeatedly behind schedule. Liefeld claimed the delays sprang from his management responsibilities; less charitable observers atrributed them to his sudden acquisition of substantial wealth and lack of adequate supervision. Liefeld continued to plot and create properties including Youngblood and its various spin-offs, the Superman-like Supreme and the femme fatale Glory. Critical approval of these characters was scarce and, while Liefeld's wholesale sales to comic books dealers appeared strong, actual sales to consumers, especially of secondary titles from Extreme and Maximus, were surprisingly weak.

In 1996, Liefeld and Lee returned to Marvel to reboot some of the company's classic series, an event dubbed "Heroes Reborn". Liefeld was contracted to write 12 issues of The Avengers and write (with Jeph Loeb) and illustrate 12 of Captain America, but he failed to meet the agreed-on publishing schedule and his output met with an unenthusiastic response, failing to reach the sales targets required in his agreements with Marvel. Marvel terminated the agreement, and the balance of the two series were assigned to Lee's studio.

In 1996, Liefeld left Image Comics, after disputes with his partners led Marc Silvestri to temporarily break away from Image. The comics press variously reported several underlying issues: the effect of Liefeld's erratically published and critically derided lines on the company's reputation, his supposed misuse of his position as Image CEO to unfairly benefit his own publishing efforts (including Maximum Press, which was not a part of Image) and attempts to recruit artists employed by his Image partners, a violation of their informal agreements. As further financial reverses followed, Liefeld moved all of his publishing ventures into a new company Awesome Comics. This new enterprise, announced in April 1997 as a partnership between Liefeld and Malibu Comics founder Scott Rosenberg, concentrated its efforts on newer properties.

At Awesome, Liefeld and Loeb attempted to resurrect their unused Captain America plots for a "new" character, Agent America. This character was nearly identical in appearance and background to Captain America, perhaps so Liefeld could then re-use his art with only minor alterations. Under legal pressure from Marvel, Liefeld scraped Agent America and acquired the rights to the Fighting American, a long-dormant, patriotic superhero invented in the 1960s by Captain America's creators, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. Liefeld hoped that ownership of a previously created character would help him escape legal action from Marvel but Fighting American was also nearly identical to Captain America (his shield no longer contained a star in the center, for example: the shield logo had moved to his chest). Marvel and Liefeld settled their dispute with limits placed on Liefeld's use of the property: for example, their agreement reportedly stipulated that Fighting American was prohibited from throwing his shield, a standard fighting technique of Captain America.

Meanwhile, Liefeld hired acclaimed comic book writer Alan Moore to revive many of his creations, which had sharply declined in popularity. Moore wrote a few issues of Youngblood and Glory, but his most lauded work for Liefeld was on Supreme, which played on the character's more generic traits in a clear tribute to the Mort Weisinger-era Superman.

Awesome's initial releases, including entirely new properties like Kaboom!, were generally received more favorably by critics than the Extreme and Maximum lines had been. However, Awesome soon collapsed under the burdens of disputes among its partners, its unpredictable publishing schedule, its erratic content and Liefeld's growing unpopularity with comics consumers.

In recent years, Liefeld has returned to his former characters in the X-Men franchise, providing pencils for the occasional cover and/or interior of Cable and X-Force. These books had continued to be somewhat popular properties until the early 2000s, when both were cancelled.

In 2004, he reunited with Fabian Nicieza for an X-Force miniseries and illustrated the early covers for Nicieza's Cable and Deadpool. In that same year, Liefeld formed Arcade Comics and once again announced plans to revive Youngblood.

Liefeld's new website was launched in May 2005 at Rob Liefeld.net. At about the same time, new work for DC Comics was reported.

Artistic Criticism

Below are common criticisms of Liefeld's artwork. Some of the features cited are idiosyncratic, while others were fairly widespread trends in mainstream comics of the 1990s. Although all these criticisms have been made of Liefeld's art, he was still a huge draw as an artist in the early 1990s, and retains some degree of popularity today.

• Limited facial expressions, generally ranging from barely-restrained anger to a look that is regularly described as "constipated" by less charitable commentators
• Distorted proportions such as tiny heads, wrists, and ankles and oversized breasts and muscles, as well as the occasional swipe with female face and breasts layered onto an obviously male figure
• Conspicuous panel-to-panel inconsistencies in costumes, backgrounds, and even the number of digits on characters' hands
• Poses that appear to be both illogical (in the context of the plot) and anatomically impossible, or at least uncomfortable
• Skewed perspective: often a picture will be begun in one perspective then be finished in another.
• Disproportionate facial features. Eyes are frequently asymmetrical, often drawn on a skewed axis on the face; noses are often misplaced; and grimacing characters regularly display impossible numbers of uniformly-shaped teeth.

While Liefeld's artwork, particularly in his earlier efforts, manifested a striking design sense, his shortcomings were initially covered up by strong, experienced inkers. As Liefeld was able to exercise greater control over the form in which his work appeared, those shortcomings became conspicuous, and defined the public perception of his work.

Residual Effects of Liefelds work

Grant Morrison and a group of Artists decided to parody Liefeld's artistic styles and popularity with a Doom Patrol special called Doom Force.

Herb Trimpe, a staff artist at Marvel Comics, most notably known for his work on The Incredible Hulk in the 1990s decided to adopt many elements of Liefeld's style, including Liefeld's gross exaggeration of anatomy. Critics reviewing the work felt that Trimpe ended up copying all of Liefeld's artistic weaknesses without copying those elements that appealed to Liefeld's fans.

Trivia

• Liefeld was featured in a television commercial for Levi's "501" jeans, directed by Spike Lee.
• Liefeld marketed the action figure of Youngblood's archer character, Shaft, as "Rob Liefeld's Shaft: 7 Inches, fully poseable," an unintentional double entendre.
• He is married to Joy Creel, one of three triplet sisters who starred in two The Parent Trap broadcast TV sequel movies with Barry Bostwick and Hayley Mills.

Reference

Fiore, R. (Aug. 1992) "Funnybook Roulette". The Comics Journal #152

External Links

• Rob Liefeld's official website
• Extreme Genesis - a Rob Liefeld fan site with many samples of his artwork
• Rob Liefeld - a list of Liefeld's work while at Marvel Comics
• Official Rob Liefeld forum

• 1968 births
• People from California
• Comic book publishers
• Comics artists
• Comics writers