movieguru

His art was new and innovative at the time. Same with McFarlane. Styles and tastes change over time. People will be saying the same thing about artists of today 15 years from now. As time passes things that were in style and popular in the present will look silly when looking back. Parachute pants, leg warmers, afros, mullets, mini skirts, etc. were in style at one time but look dumb now.

calhoun07

Yet Jack Kirby is still highly regarded because he knew how to DRAW.

Fad art is laughable 15 years down the road, but great art holds value for a lot longer.

There is a lot of stuff from when I was a kid that looked cool then but I can see it sucked...it sucks now and, you know what, it really did suck back then too. I was just not well developed enough to see it for myself. Liefeld sucked then too...yeah, he did. Just because it sold a lot of comics doesn't mean people thought it was great art.

ivelostr2

I remember liking Liefeld but noticing the feet and laughing abou them, but looking at that site, his art is really terrible...back on topic though, I can't read anything by Samm Keith, I hated his art when i was a kid, and I hate it now, I know he has a fan following, but I just don't get it...

http://www.comicsbulletin.com/news/images/0305/maxx.jpg
http://www.dccomics.com/media/covers/7793_400x600.jpg
http://wolverine.x-knights.com/fullsize/wolverine19.jpg
http://www.internationalhero.co.uk/m/maxx1.jpg

davidh777

Don't know this guy but enjoyed the link

Nick Danger

It was new and different at the time. It was all jagged and full of aggressive lines. The figures were weird and distorted, and the postures were impossible. That's fine. There is no reason for an artist to keep doing what everyone else has been doing.

But here's the thing. Liefeld had no sense of composition. He couldn't string panels together to tell a story. His action shots were hard to follow. It was obvious that he had never learned his trade.

The artistic ideal is to learn the rules, then to understand the reason behind the rules, and then break the rules with deliberation. Shakespeare had a monstrous vocabulary, but when there wasn't a word in English that fit the meaning and the line, he would invent one. Picasso learned how to draw women realistically before he started drawing them from three different views at once.

If someone is breaking the rules without understanding the consequences, it's not being a better artist. It's being a hack.

As for fads in clothing, the bad ones are mocked, but the good ones stick around or are remembered with respect. People still wear blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a leather jacket like Brando.

TimeandTide

Thanks for posting that! My girlfriend has never even cracked open a comic book but she was laughing out loud right next to me as we read that. Awesome stuff.

And yes, Liefeld is the worst.

project86

I'm not too big on him. When he took over The Avengers though, I thought he did an great job with it.

EdTheRipper

That's a great link. I was into comics right around the time that Liefeld was starting on The New Mutants. I loved his art back then. Looking at the selections in that article had me wondering what the hell I was thinking back then.

whotony

i hate leifeld but loved sam keith.
i thought the maxx was mazing as a story and for the artwork.

the mtv mini series cartoon was brilliant.

bloopbleep

I remember back in the late 80`s comics sucked and it was Liefelds enthusasim in a Marvel Age magazine, that made me want to try his stuff out, he had hundreds of great ideas running around in his head like Cable and Deadpool(marvel last 2 creations that actually mattered).New Mutants and X-force were kick ass books, it was the stuff Rob and Image did to the industry later that ruined comics.I for a fact cannot remember a artist as hot as Liefeld that has fallen as low. his art was decent now crap. did the man just take the money and run(he made millions like all the original image guys) or is thier a substance abuse problem?

cupcake jesus

Yeah, don't drag Sam Kieth into this. He clearly understands anatomy and composition. He has a style. Same with a guy like Kelley Jones.

cheers,

-the Jesus

ivelostr2

While following the links I posted, I realize Sam Keith is consistant with his art, but I just don't like it. I do appreciate it more now than when i was you ng though...


Nick

zombeaner

I haven't been into comics for a long time, but the only artist who I really sought out at the time was Mark Texeira. He had a really distinct style that I dug.

That link is great, like I said, I've been out of the comics for many years but that cracked me up!

Rogue588

I felt the same way about Bill Sienkiewicz. Man, I hated it when he came onto New Mutants. Now he's one of my favorites.

I like Keith and Texeira too. But I think Texeira does his best work with Saltares.

zombiezilla

Sam Keith has consistency...he's consistently bad. I just hate his stuff, and have never been able to enjoy a single panel of the stories he's worked on. Just my opinon, though; art is such a personal issue (as far as preferences go), I'm glad we have enough artists in comics to bitch about the ones we don't like.

calhoun07

To make comic book art, an artists really needs to know how to draw from life and make realistic looking art. I think Liefeld never studied drawing actual people and went straight for getting ideas from looking at past comics.

slop101

And that's just part of it. A good comic book artist also needs to be able to tell a story, with the flow of art from one panel to the next - Liefeld's panels were just disjointed splash-pages with no reason or flow whatsoever.

ChristopherS

More unforgivable than the terrible artwork from some of the Image guys was the arrogance in thinking they were writers also- pushing out the two long-time X-Men writers Chris Claremont and Louise Simonson, who I'm sure took a writing class or two in their day. So Shakesperian at writing were the Image crew that actual writers had to come in to make sense of their scripts most of the time, and all the X-books quickly spiraled into an unreadable mess. That's when I, and everyone else, left comics... I came back a few years ago and I'm happy to see Marvel has a lot of quality artists now w/o much of the Image guys around. And for the poster that said the Image art was simply trendy and looks dated like anything else- look at the artwork of someone like John Byrne from the 70's. Still looks like fantastic art. Only clothing styles on characters are going to give anything away. Just one example.

calhoun07

Yes. The best comic book artists could step into a movie studio and storyboard a movie. I know there are a few that have gone on to story board movies. If Rob Liefeld storyboarded a movie, it would be a worse mess than a Hottie or a Nottie.

calhoun07

I was telling a friend at work about this thread and the linked site and he said how much he hated Liefeld on X-Force and also was telling me to check out Liefeld's site. Which is how I found this one...


I swear he draws the noses on all men exactly the same, regardless of who they are. And I could post more examples from his site to show that, but check out the two drawings down in the lower left....Long haired guy has the SAME chest proportion as the Captain America drawing I posted earlier. He STILL has not learned how to draw chests, and it's surprising considering the sheer amount of gay porn he draws inspiration from. And that woman's back??? WHOLLY CRAP! See a chiropractor, babe! I am no doctor, but I know a spine isn't supposed to bend at a sharp angle like that in the middle of your back! OUCH!!!!

And please don't give me it's for exaggeration or whatever...it still should somewhat follow the rules of human anatomy. And this drawing does not.

calhoun07

Here is another favorite:

Where are those extra bullet or laser or phaser or whatever they are shots coming from? I see eleven bullets or phaser beams or whatever they are. Three guys...all standing on tippy toes as they shoot because it's easier that way, you know...three guns, and all those bullets going off at the same time, because they all have reached pretty much the same distance.

True_Story1011

One guy that I hated with a passion was Jae Lee, When he did namor I just about barfed - then Jim Lee put him on a Wildcats book...


I stopped paying attention to him with vol. 1 of Hellshock...

But I think he started using reference for Vol. 2 Hellshock - and it was a short lived excellent story! Jae Lee has consistantly been getting better and now is on my top list of favorite artists.

True_Story1011

As for McFarlane and crews artwork towards the end from Marvel were all pretty pathetic. Most were waiting for their contracts to lapse.

Spider-Man: Torment was very well done and not untill the later issues with Wendingo to the ass clowned crossover with X-Force did i realize they were just throwing sketches on pages and than sending off to the inkers.

The only artists style that has been consistant over the years from the early Image years has been Erik Larsen... not to mention the most on time title with the original creator.

But I would say Stephen Platt's artwork was pretty horrible also (but his first couple covers for Moon Knight rocked!)... OH DONT FORGET DAN 'wannabe Rob Liefeld' Fraga was just as bad.

Nick Danger

I think this is a lot better than the other art we've seen in this thread. The hands and feet of the main figure are good. The gun is actually in his hand. His back isn't broken.

There might be too many "bullets" for logic, but it's a comic book cover and appearance is always more important than logic. I don't care about that.

But Mrs Danger pointed out that having all those "bullets" stop right on the page weakens the picture. The round ends pull the eye from the main focus. Check it out: if you scroll up just a little and crop off those three round ends, the picture looks a lot better.

fujishig

Jae Lee definitely improved from his early days... loved his Inhumans mini. He's also much better suited to miniseries, I didn't even know Hellshock v. 2 finished coming out.

Steve Epting has been around for a while, but for some reason I thought his run on Avengers was very plain... when I picked up his work in Crossgen, it had improved a lot.

Also, Oliver Coipel was (IMHO) absolutely terrible on Legion Lost... I hated it. He had much improved by the time the "regular" Legion series started, and of course they pulled him off of it to helm a more popular book.

Travis Charest is now one of my favorite (and also one of the slowest) artists, but his early work in the Flash Annual and the first few Darkstar issues were nothing more than a Jim Lee clone.