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Post by Deleted on Jun 9, 2023 12:29:35 GMT -5
Rob did this recent variant cover to Black Widow #13....his women continue to look butt-awful. This is the only variant I skipped from the entire series. Yes I am Robphobic but his art causes me stress. It burns my eyes. Sorry but I remain unimpressed....
Now here's a Widow cover...
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Post by kirby101 on Jun 9, 2023 13:16:57 GMT -5
The pecs are there, just flat, but there is no rib cage under the pecs. The abs start right underneath. It's first year art school anatomy. I challenge you to show some artists that include all those dimensions in the last 40 years. Even Kirby cheated on those features. He remembered Deadpool had a rib cage here.
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Post by kirby101 on Jun 9, 2023 13:30:12 GMT -5
I have no personal animosity toward Leifeld, I just don't think he is a good artist. I don't begrudge his success. And the things I am talking about is first year art school stuff. And yes, it is blatant to any artis that his anatomy is wrong. Someone who has been drawing comics for 30 years should know better. I can't comment on his abilities at writing or storytelling because I haven't read enough, or any of his books.
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Post by codystarbuck on Jun 9, 2023 14:04:24 GMT -5
I have no personal animosity toward Leifeld, I just don't think he is a good artist. I don't begrudge his success. And the things I am talking about is first year art school stuff. And yes, it is blatant to any artis that his anatomy is wrong. Someone who has been drawing comics for 30 years should know better. I can't comment on his abilities at writing or storytelling because I haven't read enough, or any of his books. Well, he didn't go to art school, so there is that. He once said, in a Comic Scene interview, that he wanted to quit high school to try to break into comics, but his parents made him finish school first. So, given a lack of instruction, he has shown improvement in later years; whether that is actual practice paying off or better at using technology to fix his weaknesses, I think it amounts to the same thing. I still don't care for his work, for the most part, because I find his storytelling to be pretty bad and his characters too generic; but, I thought he did some good work, at DC, before he got lazy, at Marvel. Either that or he was paired with better inkers who brought better control to his work. To use an analogy that driver1980 will like, he is like the guys who work for AEW, who never learned to work a pro wrestling match properly and just do flashy stunts. It fails to do what it sets out to accomplish, but enough of the fans seem to enjoy it. A very select set of fans, to be sure, especially when you look at sales on an average issue with his work, vs a first issue, during a period of rampany speculative buying.
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Post by MWGallaher on Jun 9, 2023 14:57:35 GMT -5
His avoidance of feet is an insignificant complaint, really just a game, where once it's pointed out, you can't help but notice it. My problems with his work are more substantial, and it's a long list. He has practically zero ability to stage his panels against a convincing background set, choosing to place the action in rooftops, empty warehouses, or just in a void. If it's not a warehouse, he'll draw it like a warehouse anyway. This is one of his pages I found particularly hilarious, showing the luxurious traveling accommodations inside the Avengers' quinjet: He can botch placement of figures in even the most rudimentary of backgrounds: where are these characters in relationship to the floor, the one-way mirror? He struggles to consistently or convincingly position multiple figures within the same panel. Does this girl appear to be 11 steps up from the guys? If the guys are standing on the same surface, how far below the panel are their feet? Is the big guy really supposed to have arms longer than his buddy's full height? No one ever seems to be in their environment, and usually not in the same space as the other characters. Of all the techniques artists have to convey three dimensions--perspective, lighting, even just making distant characters smaller than closer ones, he seems to only have mastery of one, the very simplest: closer characters overlap farther ones. That's one reason I think of him as a "Colorforms artist": it appears that he takes his established set of poses and plops them down somewhere on the page, roughly coordinated with whatever crude background there is, and calls it done.
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Post by kirby101 on Jun 9, 2023 15:17:40 GMT -5
Looking at the samples here and online, does he ever use shadow or lighting on any of his figures? It all looks like outlines and hatcthing.
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Post by tarkintino on Jun 9, 2023 16:47:59 GMT -5
And Liefeld likes to claim he was responsible for one of the best selling comics of all time. Sure. Ok. But what was the drop off from #1 to #2? From #2 to #3? Because he also need sto own that he was responsible for one of the biggest issue to issue drops in sales on a comic of all time. It's almost like hype and marketing brought a lot of people to the table but once they sampled the shit sandwich being served by Liefeld they left in droves. -M This.
About other artists of the past 40 years (that's 1983-present, folks) who hit all of the anatomy checklist? Start with most artists known for painting working for DC, Marvel or Warren; they were not doing the Bizarro / untrained child art comparable to Liefeld.
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Post by kirby101 on Jun 9, 2023 17:12:43 GMT -5
I think all his Image contemporaries hit the mark.
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Post by codystarbuck on Jun 9, 2023 17:54:39 GMT -5
Looking at the samples here and online, does he ever use shadow or lighting on any of his figures? It all looks like outlines and hatcthing. I have seen some originals (photos) and they generally had X-marks to indicate where shadow should be. He wasn't alone in that, but it was pretty significant. I have seen other artists do that, rather shade large areas, for the inker to then add it; buy, his had it on figures. One thing I noticed about him and his studio, as well as some of the other Image crowd was that they left it to the colorist to add depth, via digital coloring, since they could control tone with ore precision. All of the depth of a scene seemed to come from the digital color, rather than the inking. I wouldn't mind the cross-hatching, if he actually knew how to do it properly. It's not just him, though, as I have seen it with Jim Lee and some of the others and with their inkers, like Scott Williams and Art Thibert, though I have no idea if the add that themselves our just follow the pencils, without comparisons of before and after. With both inkers, in the 90s, I saw that in everything they were inking; but, maybe it was because so many pencillers were doing that. I have seen some of Thibert's work, without that, though. I suspect a lot of that is from using pens, rather than a brush, for a lot of their work. I do recall hearing several artists of the 90s talking about using technical pens. Personally, I could never get them to work well for me, though I was never good with a nib, either, unless it was a fountain pen. Even then my art was better in pencil (not that it ever developed to any great level, since I was never able to pursue actual art instruction).
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Post by Icctrombone on Jun 11, 2023 4:22:03 GMT -5
Deadpool: Badder Blood has sold out and is going to a second print.
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Post by codystarbuck on Jun 11, 2023 12:48:36 GMT -5
Deadpool: Badder Blood has sold out and is going to a second print. Not to sound antagonistic; but, what was the print run? I know from my days as a bookseller that publishers, today, with digital printing, do much smaller initial print runs and go to reprint quickly. It's not like the old newsstand days, where they massively overprinted and aimed to sell at least half, to be successful. Around 1997, the publishing industry took a major hit with a bad Christmas, where they were over-printing titles and they had a lot of major turkeys, like the twin Stephen King/Richard Bachman novels, Robert James Waller's Puerta Vallarta Squeeze, Faye Dunaway's memoirs, an Erma Bombeck book and two Michael Jordan books, while he was off trying to play baseball. Bookstores were massively over-stocked and publishers took so many returns that a few nearly went into bankruptcy. It led to a major change in the way most printing houses did their initial print runs, doing much smaller offerings, then quickly going back to press and fulfilling new orders. Once in a while it backfired, like the release of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the 4th book in the series. it was the first time it got national media attention (in the US) and bookstores were doing midnight release parties and they drastically under-estimated demand and spent the next couple of months playing catch-up. As a result of that experience, when I hear something has sold out its print run and gone back to press, my first question is how big was the print run? Marketing people like to use statements like that to push the book harder. Some publishers actually deliberately keep their print runs small, to sell to a fixed audience, then use press statements like that to them market a reprinting to a bigger audience. Regnery Press, a conservative political book publisher uses that tactic all of the time, printing up a run which they then sell to political campaigns and action committees, then use those sales to claim sell outs when they print for the retail stores and publicize that in the media and trade publications. They did it with the Swift Boat book they did, when John Kerry was running against George W Bush, in 2004 and made claims that it was being censored by liberal bookstores, who refused to carry it, pointing fingers at Barnes & Noble. That so ticked off the chief shareholder and CEO, Len Riggio that he took out a full page ad, in the New York Times saying that B&N was selling the book and would sell more if the publisher ever fulfilled the orders we had placed. Trump purchased enough copies of Art of the Deal to get it onto the New York Times Bestseller list, then the publisher used that to sell it to others like it was THE business book. Granted, these days, even selling out a small print run, for a comic book, is a big thing.
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Post by Deleted on Jun 11, 2023 15:14:19 GMT -5
Deadpool: Badder Blood has sold out and is going to a second print.
Kinda funny that the villain is called Thumper, that's what the girls used to call me....
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Post by chaykinstevens on Jun 11, 2023 16:04:14 GMT -5
Deadpool: Badder Blood has sold out and is going to a second print. Didn't you already tell us this in your initial post?
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Post by berkley on Jun 11, 2023 16:08:20 GMT -5
I find Jim Lee and a few other popular superhero artists from the 1990s onwards not dissimilar to Liefeld in their overall aesthetic, even though they may be much better artists technically, with a better grasp of anatomy and how to frame a panel and so on. One of several reasons I find most superhero comics after the 1980s unreadable.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Jun 11, 2023 17:22:24 GMT -5
You missed the most important part... why does a guy that has no mouth, and obviously talks with his abdomen, need a head set? Seriously though, that cover isn't as atrocious as some Liefield art, but that doesn't make it good. I'm glad you like it, you're definitely allowed, but it's not going to compare favorably to, well, anything. UNLIKE AEW, where I could point out Cody is being an old fuddy duddy like Jim Cornette and wants 20 minutes of rest holds to built a match instead of amazing feats of athleticism, which he's welcome to. I'll stick with my flips and excitement.
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