One more week.
That's all that's left of this spring's Research Rewind slate, good gentles all. I'm in the home stretch on my paper, which I'll be delivering next Saturday afternoon to the great acclaim of one and all (or a reasonable facsimile thereof). That means that next week will be a fresh off the laptop diary, possibly with Exciting News about my latest efforts to take over the world, make a name for myself, and keep the GTPOD from eating me, the Double Felinoid, or the Last Homely Shack.
I live such an exciting life. I really do.
Precisely what next week's diary will be about is still unclear. I might talk about my recent visit to Boston, which was terrific in every way except for the panic attack I had when a cop pulled me over for speeding. There might be some new developments in Jean Louis de Pouffe studies, and wouldn't that be fun? I could haul my friends away from the Kalamazoo Medieval Studies Congress for hijinx and whoopee-good fun in the fleshpots of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and wouldn't you just love to hear about that? Or maybe I'll just ramble about the Congress, tell a couple of cute anecdotes about my cat, and semi-liveblog the Pseudo Society.
That's the beauty of next week: I have no idea what I'll be writing about until I start, and you - yes, you! - will get to see the glorious results. It could be a literary masterpiece to rank with Toni Morrison's latest, or it could be a complete disaster that will be a blotch on the family eschutcheon for generations to come, or at least until my next foray into Badbookistan.
As for Badbookistan...as promised, tonight's Research Rewind is my second straight look at Comics So Bad They're Good. Last week it was three groups of boy patriots created by Golden Age legends Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, best known to you, me, and Mrs. Calabash as the creators of the non-GTPOD unofficial and copyrighted by others mascot of these diaries. Tonight it's a non-Golden Age artist who's a legend in his own mind even though he's all but unable to draw a human being from the knees or wrists down.
Come with me, then, on this last Research Rewind, as we venture with trembling hearts and averted eyes into the corner of Badbookistan I explored in the summer of 2013 in a diary called
HOW NOT TO DRAW COMICS THE R___ L___ WAY
One of my favorite books growing up was my father's old copy of Robin Hood.
That Dad had owned such a book was not a surprise; he was an only child and grew up in a comfortable upper middle class household that could afford to indulge him a bit. If it took a bit of finagling before he finally got the Lionel Train set of his dreams as a gift instead of a high quality woolen blanket, nevertheless my grandparents lavished him with as many good things as they could afford. Summers were spent swimming and relaxing at Conneaut Lake, he was a given a professional-quality Speed Graphic camera and the leisure to learn to use it, and as I've written about elsewhere, he and his family took a trip all the way to New York to see the wonders of the 1939 World's Fair. Riding lessons, piano and trumpet lessons, dancing lessons, even his own dinner jacket when he barely out of short pants…all of these were part of my father's childhood, and when he finally became a father himself, he made sure that I, too, was given music lessons, a trip abroad, and all the books I could read.
The copy of Robin Hood was among these. It was a version of the legendary Howard Pyle retelling of the classic stories of Robin, Little John, Friar Tuck, Maid Marian, Alan-A-Dale and his wife, and Will Scarlet as they battled Guy of Gisborne, King John, and the Sheriff of Nottingham, and I was enthralled from the moment I first opened it and began to read. At least once I was so caught up in the action that I crawled out of bed, cracked open the book to a favorite chapter, and attempted to read it by the dim glow of a nightlight plugged into an outlet near the floor.
You can imagine how pleased Mum and Dad were when they glanced in my room and saw that.
One of the things I liked the best about Robin Hood was the illustrations. The book had been written and published in the 1920's, which meant a full color painting glued to the cover and Howard Pyle's delicate, beautifully detailed drawings of the characters and incidents in each chapter. The costumes were more medievaloid than medieval, and Dad's copy was all black and white rather than in color, but Pyle had had a good eye and a fine hand, and the result was a treat for the eye that left me longing for sweeping gowns, dagged sleeves, tunics with tights, and of course a sword of my very own that I could use to fight evil.
This book also left me with a permanent love for good illustration. N.C. Wyeth's magnificent art for the magazines…Rockwell Kent's stunning illustrations for Moby Dick…Agnes Miller Parker's wondrous evocations of The Faerie Queen's Britomart and the Red Cross Knight…Barry Moser's magisterial work on the Bible…all of the above have left me gasping at their beauty, technical prowess, and ability to bring out something essential in the narrative. The best illustrators can and do collaborate with the writer on some level, making the words come alive to the extent that they almost serve as a sort of co-creator. Just think of Sir John Tenniel's Alice, who is still the girl in Wonderland despite the best efforts of Tim Burton, or of how Sherlock Holmes struggled to find an audience until Sidney Paget decided that his brother-in-law would be the perfect model for Arthur Conan Doyle's prickly detective.
Most novels today are straight text, with no illustrations of the characters except possibly on the cover. Readers are left to develop their own impressions of what the hero and her boyfriend look like, or whether that scar on the villain's jaw is a thin red line, a ridge of keloid tissue, or a jagged white line. Small presses and limited editions are the only remnants of what was once a thriving part of the publishing industry.
The one exception to this is, of course, comics and graphic novels. There the illustration not only enhances the narrative, many times it is the narrative, as the arrangement of the panels, the inclusion of a single background image, or the choice of color can make the difference between the ordinary and the timeless. To name just one example, Art Spiegelman's choice of mice to represent the persecuted Jews and cats as Nazis in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus drove home not only the idea of Jews as prey but also the sadism behind the Nazi movement, for who among us hasn't seen a cat toy with its victim before the final blow? And the choice of a red dress for Death instead of her usual punked-out black in the funeral sequence in Neil Gaiman's magnificent run on Sandman made it clear that this was not simply one of the Endless doing her job, but a sister's pain at having to say good-bye to a beloved brother.
There are many fine comic artists currently working, in styles that range from Alex Ross's breathtaking gouaches to David Aja's spare, almost flat pen and ink. Many of these artists don't work in a particularly realistic style, nor should they; we aren't talking portrait art or religious frescoes, after all. We're talking stories, and if that means Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home is all scratchy line drawings that emphasize some aspects of her childhood for dramatic effect, well, that's what they're intended to do. Ditto Jack Kirby's swooping heroes exploding out of their panels to enhance the action during fight sequences, or Wendy Pini's sinuous, Art Nouveau trees and backgrounds that bring out how very different the World of the Two Moons is from ours.
Alas, not all comic artists are so talented. Sturgeon's Law applies to everything and everyone, much as we'd wish otherwise, and for every panel or character design that enhances the story, there are a dozen that are hastily drawn, poorly laid out, or simply average. Even the best artists have bad days, or have trouble with one aspect of their work - the emphatic jaws in John Byrne's early work were distressingly similar for many years (and just plain distressing when used on characters as different as Kitty Pryde and Clark Kent) - and of course most artists aren't even that good. Most are adequate to the task and no more, and if they likely won't get a retrospective at the Norman Rockwell Museum the way Alex Ross did a few years back, well, most writers aren't going to be up for an Eisner any time soon either.
And then there are the handful of artists whose work is beyond the merely mediocre, beyond the average, beyond the dull. These are artists who consistently produce art that at best is meh and at worst so resplendently horrid that the reader seriously has to wonder if they own a locked file of blackmail material that they trot out whenever an editor balks at extending their contracts. There aren't many of them, thank God and the angels, but there are some, and in at least two cases I've stopped buying comic books I enjoyed quite a bit because the art was so bad it was impossible to figure out what was going on.
One of these pinnacles of awfulness is the subject of tonight's diary. Those among you who regularly follow comic books have probably already guessed this fine individual's identity and know what's coming, especially the final image that I'll link to. For the rest of you, my faithful readers, I must offer the following warning:
DO NOT READ THE REST OF THIS DIARY WHILE EATING OR DRINKING.
DO NOT READ IN THE PRESENCE OF YOUNG, IMPRESSIONABLE CHILDREN.
DO NOT HAVE YOUR PETS IN RANGE OF A THROWN OBJECT.
WARN YOUR SPOUSE AND NEIGHBORS SO THEY DO NOT CALL 911 IN THE BELIEF THAT YOU ARE EITHER HAVING AN EPILEPTIC FIT OR BEING MURDERED.
SIT ON A TOWEL.
AND WHATEVER YOU DO, DON'T BLINK.
You have been warned.
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Little in our subject's early life would indicate that he would eventually become a byword for early success, creators' rights, and Art So Bad It May Cause Myocardial Infarction. Born in Anaheim, California, in the late 1960s, he fell in love with superhero comics as a child, started drawing in imitation of what he saw, and soon determined that this would be his path in life. He accordingly took art classes in high school, enrolled in a life drawing class at a community college after graduation, and attended comic conventions to meet and seek the advice of idols such as George Perez, Marv Wolfman, and John Byrne.
All this time he continued to draw his own comics featuring his own characters. He worked the traditional series of odd jobs while learning his craft, such as building houses for California's booming housing market and delivering the occasional pizza, and he drew. And drew. And drew. Some of these early efforts were sent to small comics companies in hopes of getting a break, but he was too intimidated, and too uncertain of his own talent, to send so much as a single character study to DC or Marvel. These giants, which bestrode the comics industry like the statue of Superman in Metropolis, Illinois, were beyond his grasp.
Or so our young hero thought, at least until a buddy told him that a major comics convention, one with actual, genuine editors in attendance, would take place in San Francisco, only eight hours away. Even better, his aunt and uncle lived nearby, which meant that he and his buddy would have a place to crash that wasn't the hotel ballroom during an all-night marathon of old Ralph Bakski Spider-Man episodes.
And so, like Luke Skywalker taking up his light saber and sallying forth to Alderaan, this brave, determined youngster packed up his portfolio, got in the car, and headed toward the City by the Bay. His courage almost deserted him when he got to the convention - all his samples were of his own characters, not icons like Wonder Woman or Mr. Fantastic, because he was sure he couldn't draw them well enough to impress the pros - but egged on by his friend, he still screwed his courage to the sticking point and pitched himself to the people who could give him a job doing what he loved.
A DC editor saw his work and liked it well enough to request more samples. This was good enough to raise anyone's hopes, especially in an artist who was only nineteen and still learning his craft. But then, in a twist worthy of a comic book, a Marvel editor saw his work and not only liked it, but liked it well enough to offer him a job on the spot.
That our fledgling legend's assessment of his own work as not quite ready for prime time proved correct -what he turned in wasn't good enough to see print - this was the break our hero had been waiting for. Soon he'd improved enough that Marvel had him doing character design work, and by 1988, when he was only twenty-one, DC had him drawing a five issue miniseries featuring two minor characters, Hawk and Dove. Never mind that the original artwork for DC had an odd layout that would have forced the reader to turn the book sideways to read it - the story was set in a "chaos dimension," so why not? - and forced the editors to cut up the drawings, paste them into a more conventional format, then have the poor inker tape them to a lightbox before they were useable. He was on his way!
And indeed he was. Despite its rough beginnings, Hawk and Dove did well enough that the wunderkind of Anaheim was soon working as the penciller for one of Marvel's subsidiary X-Men books, The New Mutants. Readers, intrigued by his unique style, began to buy what had been the X-line's lowest selling title in sufficient quantities that the book suddenly was making money rather than losing it. A little over a year later our hero was so popula that he'd somehow managed to become the chief plotter/creative force behind the comic as a whole, which in turn gave him the clout he needed to force Marvel to reboot/retitle it as X-Force.
The first issue under that name came out in 199. It sold an astonishing four million copies.
The artist/writer behind it was twenty-four years old.
And thus it was that Rob Liefeld, who was only five years removed from being too nervous to approach the Marvel booth at a comics convention, rose to become perhaps the dominant figure in superhero comics during the 1990s.
You think I exaggerate? Consider these facts, gentle readers:
- Liefeld appeared in a series of Spike Lee advertisements for Levi's 501 jeans that featured people with "unique jobs" - in 1991, when he'd been working professionally for all of three years.
- Stan Lee, the grand old man of Marvel, interviewed Liefeld in the second episode of an early 1990's documentary series modestly entitled The Comic Book Greats.
- When he decided to strike out on his own in 1992 after a dispute with Marvel, a host of other popular young artists such as Jim Lee, Erik Larsen, and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane followed him. Their company, Image Comics, allowed creators to keep the creative rights to their characters, unlike the Big Two, which regarded their artists and writers as mere hirelings. That some of Liefeld's early work for Image was less than mediocre (Liefeld blamed a friend who was doing his scripts) was less significant than the blow this struck for creators' rights; remember, this was a field where seminal figures such as Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, and Joe Simon had to sue to receive credit for developing Superman and Captain America, let alone a share of the enormous revenues generated by the comic books, toys, clothing, furnishings, movies, and television shows featuring the Man of Tomorrow and the Sentinel of Liberty.
- Despite all this, Liefeld was still so popular that Marvel paid Liefeld and fellow Image stalwart Jim Lee a big fat pile of money in 1996 to rework several of their flagship titles in what became known as the Heroes Reborn arc. Most notably, Liefeld himself would not only draw twelve issues of Captain America, but write twelve issues of The Avengers, two flagship books that needed an injection of energy and fresh creative talent.
This was in spite of a mid-90's observation by artist Barry Windsor-Smith that:
Rob Liefeld has nothing to offer. It’s as plain as bacon on your plate. He has nothing to offer. He cannot draw. He can’t write. He is a young boy almost, I would expect, whose culture is bubble gum wrappers, Saturday morning cartoons, Marvel Comics; that’s his culture. Somebody was at his house and came back with a report: There is not a single book in his house — only comic books. I see nothing in his work that allows me to even guess that there’s any depth involved in that person that might come to the fore given time.
not to mention that Liefeld's mature style proved to have several notable hallmarks that normally would have had comics fans laughing till they fell over and brained themselves on the nearest Batarang:
- exaggeratedly long legs, especially on the female characters.
- huge numbers of pouches and pockets on the costumes, often in places like thighs, rib cages, buttocks, necks, etc., where having pouches and pockets makes absolutely no sense.
- an inexplicable inability to draw human feet.
- wasp waists, especially on the female characters.
- hair that looks like it was styled with a Mixmaster and several cans of mousse.
- an inexplicable inability to draw human noses.
- musculature more appropriate to Belgian Blue meat kine than human beings.
- breasts roughly the size of cantaloupes, especially but not necessarily on the female characters.
- an inexplicable inability to draw human hands.
Liefeld later admitted that "In the mid-90's we Mortal Kombat'd everything. I'm as guilty as anyone," which certainly accounts for some if not all of what he did during the Clinton years. At the same time, the fact that nearly thirty years later he still has trouble with proportions, feet, noses, and hair is, shall we say, problematic....
But we digress.
Regardless of mounting evidence that Rob Liefeld should have taken a couple more life drawing classes before turning pro, the early to mid-90's were a heady time for someone who wasn't even thirty. That Liefeld subsequently was fired from Marvel after only six issues of Heroes Reborn because of lower than projected sales and a series of missed deadlines was proof only that he was a busy, busy man, with many commitments and much work to do. He still had his entire line at Image in addition to his work for the Big Two, after all, so what did they expect?
The abrupt cancellation of the Heroes Reborn arc was a nine days' wonder, but the comics industry (and Rob Liefeld) kept ticking along, at least at first. Marvel, after all, was a huge company with plenty of other books, and there were more than enough writers and artists the House of Ideas could tap to pick up the slack. A good chunk of Heroes Reborn was retconned, and soon Captain America, The Avengers, The Fantastic Four,, etc., etc., etc., were back to business per usual.
Image was another matter entirely.
There had been rumors of problems with the other creators at Image for quite some time, and about the time that Liefeld's relationship with Marvel went down the cosmic portal into oblivision, his relationship with Image did likewise. Liefeld, his partners charged, was writing checks on the company accounts to cover personal debts, even during periods when he was receiving hefty payments from Marvel.
Not only that, he was sleeping during board meetings, spending inordinate amounts of times in meetings at movie studios trying to interest Tom Cruise in his books, and using Image's staff to do promotional and production work for a third company, Maximum Press, where he planned to move some of his established Image characters.
And if that weren't bad enough, his supposed business partners alleged in subsequent legal proceedings, he was copying their work for his own books.
Is it any wonder that Liefeld resigned from Image only a few minutes before the partners' meeting that would have fired him?
The comics press had a field day with this, of course. Liefeld had gone from eager wannabe to wildly popular newcomer to arrogant jerk in less than a decade, which was fast enough to make the Flash raid Tony Stark's liquor cabinet for a nice, long drunk. That he next tried to found yet another company, Awesome Comics, using the unpublished scripts and artwork for the Heroes Reborn run of Captain America in a series about a strangely similar individual called Agent America, and that Marvel basically forced him to stop by threatening yet another lawsuit, only added to the fun.
That was when Liefeld, who seemed completely unaware that the word "no" had any application to his life, tried to buy the rights to yet another nearly forgotten patriotic superhero named the Fighting American so he could be the inspiration for Agent America. Needless to say Marvel found out, and this time they did sue. Even though Liefeld finalized the licensing agreement for Fighting American before the lawsuit went to trial, Marvel still forced him to accept a settlement agreement so that Fighting American wouldn't dress like the flag or use his shield like a Frisbee.
If you're confused by all this, my friends, believe me: you aren't the only one.
After all this fuss, legal action, accusations, and enough patriotic superheroes to make an American eagle make a suicide dive straight onto the point of the Washington Monument in sheer frustration, is it any wonder that Awesome, too, went under after its major investor got fed up and pulled his support in 2000? Or that Liefeld, who somehow managed to mend fences with Marvel, promptly returned to drawing mutants?
That Image actually took him back in 2007 might well qualify as that year's evidence that the Apocalypse was imminent, but fortunately for the world the news didn't extend to the seven cities which are in Asia, let alone the Archangel Gabriel.
Liefeld's subsequent career has been marked by a series of successes (Youngblood; another series of Hawk and Dove as part of DC's "New 52" relaunch of their entire line; three more New 52 titles; work on Marvel's popular Deadpool line) and controversies. He has tendency to miss deadlines, allegedly failed to return the original art to at least one creator after Awesome went under, and has attempted to explain the appropriation of other artists' work as "homages" similar to Brian De Palma repeatedly borrowing scenes and techniques from Sergei Eisenstein and Alfred Hitchcock.
That there's a big difference between an Oscar winner like De Palma referring to a baby carriage bouncing down a flight of stairs in The Untouchables and Liefeld's alleged wholesale appropriation of layouts, figure poses, and costume designs from both colleagues (fellow X-Men artist John Byrne, who was not at all happy) and role models (George Perez, who gave Lady Catherine de Bourgh a run for her money in the "severely displeased" sweepstakes) alike did not seem to register.
The most recent dustup involving Rob Liefeld was only a couple of years ago when he abruptly quit DC and bolted to (you guessed it) Image despite assurances that he would stay on his New 52 titles through the end of 2013. This time it was over bitter, and public, claims, that DC wanted too many rewrites on his scripts, that the editorial staff was incompetent, that the corporate culture had changed for the worse since DC had become part of Warner, and that the artist he had to work with on Grifter was incompetent. That the rewrites were part of an attempt by DC to ensure consistency among the New 52 titles was immaterial, and the subsequent flame war sucked in not only Liefeld, but DC editor Tom Brevoort, Batgirl scribe Gail Simone, and Batman writer Scott Snyder.
That all this was vastly entertaining to watch goes without saying; for all his influence on comics and his popularity among a large segment of the fandom, Liefeld has become something of a trouble magnet (no, really????). There are dozens of stories about him being a self-important monster who thinks he's above everyone else, and just as many about his generosity toward eager fans and new pros. No one seems to have a neutral opinion of him or his work, and since he's only 46 years old, it's a safe bet he'll be the industry's equivalent of a gigantic hissing Tesla coil in the middle of Stan Lee's living room for years to come.
All this is above and beyond the Great Ryan Coons Incident of 2009, which is almost worth a diary on Manners So Bad They'll Make Emily Post Rear Out of Her Grave and Go For Your Private Parts With a Pair of Rusty Grape Shears.
Coons, who blogs under the name "Yellow Hat Guy," attended the WizardWorld convention in the summer of 2009 with several friends. They were all on the main floor enjoying themselves when one of his companions pointed out that Liefeld, who was not listed as a guest in the program, was attending anyway and had a small booth in the Dealers' Room where he could sign autographs, draw figures, and otherwise schmooze with eager fans.
Coons, who had hated Liefeld's work for years, walked up while Liefeld was attempting to draw a sketch for a fan and demanded an apology for Liefeld's attempt at Captain America during Heroes Reborn. Liefeld, showing remarkable restraint at being interrupted, merely nodded, said "Nice to meet you," and continued to draw. Coons, showing enough gall to be divided into three parts, wandered off, found a copy of the old How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way manual, wrote a nastygram on the inside cover telling Liefeld that he should study it carefully before attempting to reboot another established cover, and requested another apology for Heroes Reborn.
He then signed it, included his e-mail address and business card, walked over to Liefeld's booth, and dropped the book in front of Liefeld while Liefeld was talking to someone else.
Needless to say, all hell broke loose.
Several dozen comic artists and writers, some of whom had made no secret of their dislike for Liefeld's work, immediately slammed Coons for being an obnoxious ass. Liefeld, again showing remarkable restraint by not belting Coons in the jaw, gave the book away. Coons whined that all he wanted was an apology. It was a nine days' wonder, and despite the passage of several years, still has to count as one of the least classy things ever done at a genre convention, which is truly saying something. It certainly wasn't Ryan Coons' finest hour.
Not that this would have been anyone's finest hour except possibly in the sort of crass animated sitcom that has made Seth MacFarlane a very, very rich man. Rob Liefeld is a human being, after all, and as much as he's undoubtedly learned to shrug off criticism, having a fanboy suggest that a working professional with over twenty years' experience under his belt needs remedial drawing lessons is pretty much the dictionary definition of "insulting"….
And then one looks at Rob Liefeld's art, and as awful as Ryan Coons' now legendary insult is, suddenly one understand exactly what he means.
Behold the glory that the is the cover for Warchild, one of Liefeld's own books for Awesome Comics:
Is it War? Or a child? No! It's Warchild!
Or Shaft, a character who is either Liefeld's attempt at an archer a la Green Arrow or Hawkeye (male) or his response to every single critic who has sneered at his attempts to draw feet:
Nice boots, dude!
Now, these examples were original characters, so it can be said that regardless of their flaws, Warchild and Shaft look the way they do because that's how they're supposed to look. This doesn't excuse what Liefeld did to characters created by other people, such as the villainous Crossbones, who may be a neo-Nazi, a fanatic disciple of the Red Skull, and the man who (briefly) assassinated Captain America, but who is assuredly not twelve feet tall and possessed of dainty white gloves:
Can we say "bad perspective, boys and girls"? Can we?
As for what he does when he draws woman, let's just say that this lady, who not only seems to have a broken back and no internal organs, but balloons instead of breasts, turns up repeatedly in the Hawkeye Initiative, which redraws appallingly poor female characters using Hawkeye of the Avengers:
SEX-AY!
And then there are these females, who eschew mammary support in favor of bondage harnesses:
Playtex? We don't need no stinkin' Playtex!
As for Asgardian villain Amora the Enchantress, her legs appear to be approximately six feet long and end in feet that would make Christian Louboutin throw himself bodily from the Whitestone Bridge in despair:
High heels? Who needs high heels to tower over everyone?
We won't even dignity his allegedly humorous panel "Shrink!" with a joke. It speaks for itself:
Shrink!
As does the questionable lens flare that makes it look like Cable is doing something incredibly nasty to Wolverine, who may be a rough, tough, cigar-smoking, beer-swilling, claw-wielding Canadian with a very bad attitude and enough body hair to double as a broadloom carpet, but surely didn’t deserve that:
Cable, uh, doing what we might call "the money shot" on Wolverine
Then again, Wolverine does have unusual taste in women, unless Jean Grey has just come back from a steampunk convention that required her to be corseted until her waist was smaller than Wolvie's wrist:
Wolverine and Jean Grey
And then there's Captain America. Poor, poor Captain America.
Remember what I said about Rob Liefeld's characters looking like Belgian Blue cattle?
Remember the Heroes Reborn story arc from 1996? The one that Marvel basically guillotined halfway through because Liefeld couldn't make his deadlines? The one that Ryan Coons demanded Liefeld apologize for?
Remember what I said about not eating, drinking, having pets in the room, and so forth?
Don't say I didn't warn you….
Captain America, hell yeah!
This ludicrous image, which was originally intended as, I kid you not, the publicity poster/pinup advertising Heroes Reborn, has become almost as much of a legend as Captain America himself. Even for a superhero who's supposed to be big, strong, and muscular, this simply doesn't work; Cap's head is too small, his chest is too big you don't say, Ellid?, his left arm seems to have been wrenched out of the socket and twisted behind his back, he has a case of scoliosis that would put Richard III to shame, and (poor bubbe) genitals roughly the size of a seven year old's. Even his shield is out of proportion, and just where is the light coming from to produce so many lens flares? And why are there lens flares anyway on a pinup?
Is it any wonder that critic Peter David took one look at this idiosyncratic take on Liberty's Greatest Champion and promptly dubbed Liefield "the Ed Wood of comics"?
Unsurprisingly, "Captain America, Well-Marbled Meat Bull," has become a byword for terrible comic art, including parodies pointing out both the anatomical difficulties and the practical advantages to having a chest that large.
Best of all, someone with far too much time on her hands decided to see just how this would look on a real, live human being, whom I sincerely hope never, ever sees this diary.
Rob Liefeld is currently working for Image (again). Whether he'll agree to return to DC, or if they'll even want him after he basically flounced off insulting everyone in the room, is still up in the air. He's not even fifty, and presumably has several decades of drawing Belgian Blue/human hybrids festooned with unnecessary pouches, large quantities of weapons, breasts the size of a watermelon that still stay perky and firm despite weighing more than a newborn child, and feet the size of a postage stamp.
The same cannot be said of Scott Clark. This unfortunate man, whose work on DC's New 52 title Grifter was characterized as "crap" by Liefeld just before he picked up his pencils and exited pursued by Ryan Coons, died a few months later after a long illness. Evidently he'd been in poor health when he attempted to work with Liefeld, which makes Liefeld's action even less mature than it appeared at first glance.
As for whether his work was indeed as bad as Rob Liefeld said, you must decide for yourself.
I know what I think, but that is neither here nor there.
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So...do any of you have a copy of Heroes Reborn wrapped in plastic? Ryan Coons bookmarked on your blogroll? An issue or two or Image or Awesome Comics' finest? Maybe a Liefeld autograph? A Belgian Blue bull? Captain America cosplaying as a Belgian Blue? This is the change to cleanse your soul....
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