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...
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.
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. 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.
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.
Well, in Rob's defense, he obviously never relied on over-referencing photos! The problem with Liefeld's art, in my non-artist view, is that he learned to draw from comics. Comics are fine as a starting point but eventually you need to go off and learn perspective and anatomy and how to draw real life stuff. You need to be able to draw "properly" before you layer in the stylization. Look at Jack Kirby, his perspective and anatomy were often crazy as hell but it wasn't because he didn't know better, it was because he made a conscious effort to tweak things for the sake of style and power in the image. And also because he was drawing ten pages a day.
I completely agree with both your observations. Plus, I agree Beaker. The ability to be untrained and not know how to draw properly is not a style. What makes Liefield even worse was he made the far more talented artists that worked for him copy his way of drawing completely. What an arrogant ass!
Was it Herb Trimpe, a solid albeit unspectacular artist from the early to middle Marvel days, that ended up aping Liefeld's "style" just to get work in the 90's?
^Not possible. Trimpe is a skilled artist, and probably the definitive Hulk artist. Liefeld doesn't have a style, he just imitates (without understanding) artists like Trimpe.
I wish IDW would hire some better artists. I tried reading Megatron's origins again and my head exploded...
Most of IDW's art is pretty good. I didn't like it at first, but its definitely grown on me. You're right about Megatron Origins though, the art is awful, but luckily the story is pretty crap too, so it can simply be discarded.
Sadly, it's true. Though Trimpe's dumbing down of his own art is at least not quite so anatomically absurd.
I forgot, what was the name of that other artist that was often compared to Leifield? The one who died of cancer recently.
I don't think he would've had a chance in the first half of the 1980s, and some people say Liefeld prospered because most comic book art was getting so stagnant and bland, even his ridiculous drawings got a lot of undeserved attention. A comic book artist from the 1980s that I personally like is David Gibbons... If a artist who knew how to draw people, he would draw a man with a gun like this and not like this. And what's worse the vastly superior David Gibbons had unofficial artistic qualifications as well.[/LEFT]
Michael Turner (one more to the disconcertingly growing number of celebs who've died suddenly this year) doesn't seem to be as terrible as Liefeld: looking at his work nothing seems to leap up at me as Jesus-titty-fucking-Christ awful, but it doesn't seem amazing either, so I'd say he is the best among the hacks.
Turner never drew anything near as horrific as Liefeld's worst, and he did have a style - an unpopular one in some circles, but a style none-the-less. Yes, he made very square squinty faces with zombie eyes and extreme! proportions, but he didn't ever put 150 teeth into someone's mouth.
funny thing is I thought his art pretty good (he did a lot of strikingly detailed covers) until other people online started pointing out all the mistakes & then I was like "ooh, now I see." I think the detailed computer coloring that was used in the 90's/current times helped to hide a lot of the flaws these artist made.