Oh God yeah - I was trying to place where I'd heard that name before. I have the tpb of that, its quite a cool idea for a story, a WW2 era crossover, but I'm damned if I can follow the art.
Rob Liefeld...
- Thread starter TedShatner10
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Oh God yeah - I was trying to place where I'd heard that name before. I have the tpb of that, its quite a cool idea for a story, a WW2 era crossover, but I'm damned if I can follow the art.
I agree that the TF/GI Joe crossover by Lee was super duper dark. He took his personal style and went too far. Still, his art is much better than Liefeld's by a mile. Some samples:
http://www.majorspoilers.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04a/MarvelJuly08/dark_tow_5.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b0/Inhumans.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b3/Manhunter_KateSpencer.jpg
Thespeckledkiwi
Vice Admiral
It was a fantastic idea. I saw some of the early artwork for the Transformers and I fell in love. Then when I started picking up the comic, I quit because I couldn't tell who was who and what was what and what the hell was going on.
I was in junior high and early high school during the height of Rob Liefield's popularity, and Image Comics, and I hated his artwork while my contemporaries got on bended knee at his alter. His art was juvenile as were the stories he created for Image, which is why I think he exploded as much as he did with my then-age bracket. Liefield's stuff was the dreams of teenage boys-- oversized, unnatural breasted woman and testostrone laden "heroic" men.
Here is my drawing of two Liefeld-style women; he really draws women like this (they have to have waists you could put one hand around, while the torso has to be snapped in two and weighed down by giant boobs). He also has a thing for oversized stiff 80s hairstyles, while his character's faces seem to be small with squinty eyes and high cheekbones. The only facial expression he could draw is scowling (with snarling mouths sometimes showing fifty to sixty teeth).
How has he not been sued or/and fired?! And why the heck did an artist who not only stole original (& superior) works of comic book art, but with such fundamentally repetitive, garish, derivative and scrappy drawing skills become so successful?!
How has he not been sued or/and fired?! And why the heck did an artist who not only stole original (& superior) works of comic book art, but with such fundamentally repetitive, garish, derivative and scrappy drawing skills become so successful?!
This picture is in perfect perspective as long as you realize the midget has opened the chest on his Captain America suit and crawled out.That was funny stuff. I can't believe he didn't include this drawing in his critique:
We laugh at the guy but the fucker's made a good life for himself. I was around in that early boom in the 90's and I have to admit it was pretty exciting (as comics go) when those guys hit. For a brief period I found myself really liking that "extreme" look Liefeld brought to X-Force though later the dime bin got me to appreciate Sinkiewicz's work on New Mutants. It's kind of embarassing to think about now.
The difference is Sienkiewicz does indeed make a stylistic choice. Liefeld is simply uneducated and unskilled. He's an amateur, and one without any evident talent, at that. His work is that of the average pre-teen.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks, and yes, it is.
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.
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!
Don't forget about Joe Mad.
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/slemmons/comments.php?y=07&m=08&entry=entry070813-071341
Also:
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