In fifty years when scholars and alleged brilliant minds are looking back at the then-defunct medium known as comic books, they’re going to look at one mind as an example of the viability of that dead medium. In between musing that humans could have been so primitive as to store pieces of paper in plastic, they’re going to spend entire classes in cute liberal classrooms dissecting the works of one man.
Rob Liefeld.
Rob Liefeld gets a lot of digs from comic book aficionados. He’s been the kick bitch for snooty mouth-breathing dungeon dwellers such as myself for the better part of two decades. And what we’ve all been missing is that not only is Rob Liefeld a mad genius, but he may be the most honest reflection of the effects of our insane society on impressionable young minds. He is a commentary in motion.
At first blush, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer awesomeness of a Liefeld panel. There are tights and straps and grenades and everywhere. Everyone is hyper-hyper sexualized. Muscles build themselves unforgivably atop other muscles. Women’s bosoms defy gravity and reach for the Heavens – which makes sense since their plush beauty can only have been forged by some horny fourteen year-old deity upon some comic Olympus. The characters brim with intensity, as evidenced by the staggering amount of concentration lines upon their faces.
When you look at a Liefeld panel, you’re watching the explosion of a what appears to be a teenage boy’s fantasies. Liefeld clearly stopped developing mentally around the time he first picked up a pencil – and that’s awesome. Looking at his panels is watching a raging teenage ID unleashed upon a page. His artwork is so awful, so frenetic, that it is absurdly awesome. People love taking swings at Liefeld for the same things that I find so brilliant. Liefeld is unencumbered by the nuances of drawing. His artwork is pure expression, clearly unbothered by conforming to conventions or dogmatic ways of viewing artwork. While other artists spend their time making certain that their characters are proper in perspective and anatomy, Liefeld simply doesn’t give a fuck. He picks up a pencil, and draws. And draws. And draws. And the world is a better place for it.
Image courtesy of our own Cornbluth’s collection
And the dirty little secret is that you and I loved Rob Liefeld at one point. Every teenage kid loved him because at one point, we were him. His drawings with uber-guns and super sexy women appealed to us. How many of us breathlessly waited in line for him to sketch us a picture? MOAR POUCHES we screamed. GIVE HIM A HUGE GUN we begged. And then myself and everyone “grew up” and all of a sudden became too cool for the demented man-child we had worshiped scant years earlier.
Perhaps it’s going to take twenty or so years before the masses can appreciate Liefeld for his absurd reflection of our collective mindset. Snarky art kids take chops at him because they’ve been fed lines about the necessity of following this or that rule. Comic book fans use him as a punching bag because his renditions of feet look like goat hooves, and if the guy isn’t holding a gun, Liefeld didn’t draw him. All it would take is one prominent scholar to come out and examine Liefeld’s artistic renditions of human beings as a reflection of the hyperreality we’re all living in and all the quasi-intellectual dorks of the world would be like,
“Oh man, Liefeld is a stunning absurdist! His drawings unintentionally reflect the physical impossibilities we all strive for!”
We all worship photoshopped chicks with flawless skin. Brodudes with twenty-four pack abdominal muscles smile at us from magazine covers. Hollywood actors don’t age. Androids with perfect complexions and diamond musculature fill our existence 24/7. If anything, Liefeld is a product of the times he grew up in. He is the culmination of a perfect storm. What do you get when you cross a sensational society filling impressionable young minds with beauty myths, and an underdeveloped man-child?
Stunning ridiculousness.
And Liefeld should be appreciated in that same manner. They’re so bad, they’re amazing. They are the reflection of one dude’s unhinged take on idealized human beings. His artwork will be viewed in 2025 as a lesson in hyperrealism and its effects on artwork in modernity. He will be the poster child for our era, lauded as an unexpected soothsayer. His splash pages will be examined in Cultural Studies in Modern America classes in cross-reference with books by Naomi Wolf. Liefeld is the zeitgeist of the TOTALLY EXTREME 1990’s when everything was foil covers, antiheroes, ultra-violence, and super sexuality. He is the absolute pinnacle of an era that was pages and pages of superheroes striking action poses, and splash pages. He is a reflection of the times to the zillionth degree.
And for that, he should be lauded. He is a case study in the effects of an absurd society on a young man. What is the point of artwork, if not to engage the viewer? Liefeld’s responsible for some of the most memorable panels in modern comics. Whether or not you laugh, vomit chunks onto the page, or marvel in its ridiculousness, you remember them. Who doesn’t remember his rendition of Captain America? Steve Rogers was rendered into a blonde mountain of muscles strapped into spandex. He probably couldn’t bend, let alone defend America. But we all remember that page. And he was scorned. Yeah man, someone couldn’t look like that.
Whoops.
Rob Liefeld is a goddamn genius. You just don’t realize it yet.
