Rob Liefeld

Rob Liefeld (born March 10, 1967) is an American comic book writer, illustrator and publisher, who is one of the Modern Age’s most popular and controversial figures. Although briefly but undeniably a superstar artist in the 1990s, the backlash against his bombastic art style and allegations of plagiarism has led to his being labelled "The Most Hated Man in Comics."

He was born in San Diego, California.

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 anatomy ranging from the improbable to the impossible. Liefeld's original creations, like many Image properties, have been panned as two-dimensional and generic. Many of his characters bear specific similarities to previously existing ones, leading some to deem Liefeld a plagiarist. He was also known to turn in his art pages on The New Mutants out of order in order to disguise the fact that he was changing the story without notifying the writer or editor, but he is not the only artist known to have done this, and writer Louise Simonson, with whom he was paired on The New Mutants, has even good-naturedly asserted that the stories were improved by him in some cases.

Most observers agree that wildly and unrealistically exaggerated 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.

Biography

In 1988, at the age of 21, 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 soon moved to Marvel, where in late 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.

The issue that broke Rob Liefeld worldwide. X-Force #1 (August 1991), featuring story and art by Liefeld.

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, huge explosions, and plentiful violence. The characters in the series were often considered derivative of characters from Marvel's stable.

Within the Image structure, Liefeld owned two imprints: Extreme Studios and Maximum Press. Once Image began publishing, Liefeld's artwork appeared much less frequently. Liefeld claimed the delays sprang from his management responsibilities; less charitable observers atrributed them to the consequences of Liefeld's sudden acquisition of substantial wealth and lack of adequate supervision. He continued to plot and create properties, however, 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 dealers appeared strong, actual sales to consumers, especially of Liefeld's secondary titles, were surprisingly weak. Later that year, 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 underlying issues: the effect of Liefeld's erratic lines on the company's reputation; Liefeld's supposed misuse of his position as Image CEO to unfairly benefit his publishing efforts; and the poaching of 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 concentrated its efforts on newer properties.

Liefeld and Loeb soon attempted to resurrect their unused Captain America plots for a "new" Awesome 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 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's 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.[1] (http://members.tripod.com/~rimes12/cap/cap20.html)

Meanwhile, Liefeld hired acclaimed comic book writer Alan Moore to revive many of his creations, which were dwindling 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, like Liefeld's previous imprints, soon collapsed under the burdens of its unpredictable publishing schedule, its erratic content, and Liefeld's ever-growing unpopularity with comics consumers.

While Liefeld's own failings, both as a creator and an entrepreneur, were the root cause of many of his imprints' problems, a more fundamental flaw was a disastrous business model: his projects began with bursts of revenue from speculative comics buyers and the optioning of movie/TV rights, but could never be expected to generate the consistent revenue stream required to run the ongoing businesses and return investment and profits to their backers (including the profits required to support Liefeld's reportedly extravagant lifestyle).

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 (http://www.robliefeld.net/), the only new work being an online comic titled Shrink (http://www.robliefeld.net/shrink.htm), a string of one-panel jokes. At about the same time, new work for DC Comics was reported.

Artistic Criticism

Below are common characteristics of Liefeld's artwork. Some 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 sheer "constipated" look (see X-Force covers above)
• Bizarre proportions such as tiny heads, wrists, and ankles and oversized breasts and muscles (see Captain America above, who appears to be several feet thick), as well as the occasional swipe with female face and breasts layered onto an obviously male figure
• Obvious panel-to-panel inconsistencies in costumes, backgrounds, and even the number of fingers 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 began in one perspective then be finished in another. (See Captain America again, clearly started in profile view then switched to three-fourths perspective, which would make him look like this (http://perso.club-internet.fr/julien-gautier/rob_capt2.gif) from above)
• Plagiarism. Rob Liefeld created several super-heroes heavily inspired by already existing ones, such as Captain America and Avengers look-alikes. He is also accused of copying panels from other comics (see some examples (http://perso.club-internet.fr/julien-gautier/rob_copie.jpg)).
• Disproportional facial features. Eyes are never symmetrical, 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.

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.

Reference

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

External Links

• Rob Liefeld's official website (http://www.robliefeld.net/)
• Extreme Genesis (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/extremegenesis/) - a Rob Liefeld fan site with many samples of his artwork
• Rob Liefeld (http://www.maelmill-insi.de/UHBMCC/NAML8.HTM#N734) - a list of Liefeld's work while at Marvel Comics
• Official Rob Liefeld forum (http://www.herorealm.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=37)fr:Rob Liefeld