The Rob Liefeld Dilemma

The Man and His Contenders

Rob Liefeld's Impact 20 Years On

Rob Liefeld isn't one of the best cartoonists in the superhero industry though his impact is immense. You've got Deadpool, the transformation of a certain X-Men sub-team into X-Force and the introduction of Image Comics. But what is remembered by most people is that his draftsmanship leaves much to be desired and was often subject to criticism. The backlash against Liefeld and co was so strong that it led to the opposite trend in superhero aesthetics, that of photographic realism. It's easy to see why Liefeld caused a stir among some people, both readers and professionals alike, that everybody would get sick of his aesthetics and skills. Cartoonists doing more realistic stuff aren't new or unique to that era as they've existed before. They might not be as common as they were a decade before but they've existed before and after Liefeld. Some might say that the preference for realism has to do with having to licence superhero comics for live action cinema. That holds water to an extent even though superhero comics are fantastical to begin with.

But mine holds water as well. Sometime after Liefeld became a big star, we saw the emergence of people using a refreshing aesthetic such as Alex Ross, Bryan Hitch and the much derided Greg Land. Greg Land is an odd example because he too gets criticised for the same things Liefeld does such as plagiarism and questionable anatomy. In fact he's more consistently criticised for these things than Jim Lee and the late Michael Turner do even though the latter two have styles not too dissimilar from Liefeld. It also says a lot about what could've been done to him if he bothered to rely on photographic sources and live modelling. Some people who grew up on Liefeld regret his choice of design and go for the exact opposite to undo his regrettable influence. While Liefeld himself wasn't the first incompetent comics professional as there were several others before him such as Vince Coletta he's a well-known one at that.

Sometime after Liefeld broke into the scene and became an infamous scapegoat, we saw the emergence of online artists with dubious designs and grasps of anatomy. Chris Chan is a good example of a bad comics artist who isn't Liefeld. Chris is only an amateur and a very bad one at that when it came to crafting the Sonichu comics. The website DeviantART is infamous among some online users for hosting a lot of bad art ranging from unimaginative plagiarism to terribly drawn smut. You can also count on some Japanese slash cartoonists for the same reason though they predated him by a few decades. But I still get to the same conclusion: there are other artists who are just as bad or even worse than Rob Liefeld is, meaning that he's in good company. He's not the first to have a questionable aesthetic nor is he the only one. His popularity was strong enough to attract criticism, which in turn pre-empted a preference for the opposite aesthetic and he was also an inspiration to some contemporary professionals.

Rather than being taken as a defence of Rob Liefeld, I'm stating that he might be far from the worst since he's got contenders and that he stood out as a bad example of a comics professional though you can add in writers like Geoff Johns to argue with that. He's a reviled character but so are Chris Chan, Andrea Avrett, Gemma Ward and Dave Cheung. He's one of the worst but he's not the worst cartoonist to have ever lived. He's an incompetent professional just like Coletta which put both of them a step above many mediocre web artists which marks the difference in reverence unless if you're that well-versed in online drama, fan fiction and webcomics. Liefeld is not the standard for bad art, he's only a better known example of it and that's all I can say about him.