Rob Liefeld...

[grabmygoblin]

A beaker full of death wrote:

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See my avatar? I did it, in the fashion of Greg Land. It's part of a larger work in progress. It's hack work, but at least it's competent. Liefeld is incompetent.

nah, that's not a porn trace, can't be Land's style.

Liefeld is... special... I like him as a self-parody. I understand the venom against him because he was so overblown and undeservedly popular in the 90's, but I think the industry has finally wised up and only uses him when the story calls for hideously out-of-proportion characters. or he self-publishes.

[A beaker full of death]

grabmygoblin wrote:

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nah, that's not a porn trace, can't be Land's style.

Porn, no. Trace, yes.
http://www.washingtonheightswarlord.com/Markq.jpg

Sorry. "Photo-reference."

[TedShatner10]

Does Liefeld's popularity in the 80s and 90s show how bad comic art was in general? In some ways I think comic art is so much better these days, with more depth, colour and detail.

[A beaker full of death]

Does Liefeld's popularity in the 80s and 90s show how bad comic art was in general? In some ways I think comic art is so much better these days, with more depth, colour and detail.

Balls.

Liefeld couldn't have gotten a job in comics until the '90s. He'd have been laughed right out of the bullpen.

Comic art was always competent from the 60s through the 80s. It also had a consistent "house" style - while artists' work was identifiable, it always fell within a rather realistic style. Steranko laid the seeds for that to change, and Miller and a few others made headway, but it was the early 90s when the advent of new print technologies, the influence of other media and the push to be as prolific as possible all combined to create the explosion of styles and artistic media that we see in comics now - and with it, the full gamut of quality, from absolute shit to truly mind-blowing artwork.

[ClayinCA]

Beaker, is your Cap picture (which is great, by the way) based on actor Mark Valley? It looks like him - and I've always thought he'd be great casting for Captain America.

[A beaker full of death]

Thanks, and yes, it is.

[God Magnus]

As bad as he is, he's hardly unique or the worst offender in the "bad artist got successful" category. Pat Lee was not only a bad artist, but he cheated an entire company of artists and writers out of money yet years later STILL manages to get work.

[grabmygoblin]

A beaker full of death wrote:

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Porn, no. Trace, yes.
http://www.washingtonheightswarlord.com/Markq.jpg

Sorry. "Photo-reference."

I think photo-referencing is a valid stylistic choice, but I'd use Mike Deodato's clear use of Tommy Lee Jones for Norman Osborn as an example before Greg Land's... er... referencing...

I can't remember the exact artist, but someone clearly was using Edward James Olmos as reference for Dum Dum Dugan in Iron Man a couple years ago, and I absolutely loved it!

[Timby]

God Magnus wrote:

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As bad as he is, he's hardly unique or the worst offender in the "bad artist got successful" category. Pat Lee was not only a bad artist, but he cheated an entire company of artists and writers out of money yet years later STILL manages to get work.

Don't forget about Joe Mad.

[A beaker full of death]

grabmygoblin wrote:

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I think photo-referencing is a valid stylistic choice...

Drawing FROM a photo is fine. Tracing it the way Land does is a fucking disgrace. See http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?t=134443

or http://lubbockonline.net/blogs/slemm...y070813-071341

Also:

[grabmygoblin]

what I love is when he traces a picture once, then proceeds, months later, to TRACE THE SAME PICTURE. he also used number 7 from that newsrama link for poses of Storm and Sue Storm...

[ancient]

Land has the unfortunate habit of tracing pictures of multiple people who look nothing alike and trying to pass it off for the same character. As a result, characters change size, shape, faces, and hair style panel-to-panel.

Wasn't there an example somewhere on the web where he used 16 very distinct women to protray Sue Storm in one issue? Often, several completely different ones appeared on the same page. Now that's funny.



This is accepted practice though, the comics industry doesn't really have any artistic or professional integrity. Which is one of the reasons so few people take it seriously as an art form. It doesn't take itself seriously, any plagerist or hack is welcome.

[Thespeckledkiwi]

God Magnus wrote:

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As bad as he is, he's hardly unique or the worst offender in the "bad artist got successful" category. Pat Lee was not only a bad artist, but he cheated an entire company of artists and writers out of money yet years later STILL manages to get work.

Yep...His conduct was horrible...

[A beaker full of death]

ancient wrote:

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Land has the unfortunate habit of tracing pictures of multiple people who look nothing alike and trying to pass it off for the same character. As a result, characters change size, shape, faces, and hair style panel-to-panel.

Wasn't there an example somewhere on the web where he used 16 very distinct women to protray Sue Storm in one issue? Often, several completely different ones appeared on the same page. Now that's funny.

And usually none of them capture the spirit of the character or of the action (unless the action involves a circlejerk of some sort).
From an artistic standpoint, there's a greater problem: he utterly fails to integrate his tracings into a cohesive whole. There's no composition; the viewer's eye is drawn every which way (which is bad enough in pin-up work, and absolutely fatal in sequential storytelling), light sources are inconsistent within the same panel... basically his work looks like an ill-planned collage.

ancient wrote:

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This is accepted practice though, the comics industry doesn't really have any artistic or professional integrity. Which is one of the reasons so few people take it seriously as an art form. It doesn't take itself seriously, any plagerist or hack is welcome.

That's most unfair. It's unfortunate that an idiot like Quesada is in charge, and that talentless hacks like Liefeld get work. But there are dozens of amazing comic book artists out there. Check out Ariel Olivetti. Not to mention Alex Ross.

[ancient]

Oh, I don't mean that everyone working in the business is a hack, I actually like most of their artists & creative people. My point is, hacks are given free reign as long as they make money, plagerism and integrity be damned. This is a problem with the industry, not the individual creators. It's not fair to the artists who work hard and don't cut corners.

A lot of this stems from the 90's, imo, when comic companies discovered that they could print any kind of shit and it would sell. Of course, the whole comics industry crashed for a while as a result.