Saturday, November 15, 2008

Early 90s-tastic comics! With analyses!


Rob Liefeld

Hey, check out the
40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings
.

I'd never heard of him, but as soon as I looked at these images I was back in high school, being met with the creeping realisation that in spite of their 2000 new spin-off mags, nothing interesting was going to happen to the X-men ever again...

15 comments:

Mr. Pony said...

Hooray, the Dump-Tent Age Comics. It was bad all over. I stopped reading comics altogether. The multiple limited-edition foil-stamped glow-in-the-dark hologram covers, the "Dark Samurai" cliché, and Liefeld and the rest of his paid-by-the-line contemporaries made up the trifecta that was the proverbial fart in my mouth, causing me to recoil in horror from comic stores for the better part of the '90s.

Ironically, I think Rob and Erik and Todd saved comics when they founded Image, by sequestering their House Style and their constant repetition of gritty demons, cyborgs, and douchebags to their own corner of the racks, leaving Marvel and DC free to explore their roots with blah blah blah blah

Galspanic said...

"Ironically, I think Rob and Erik and Todd saved comics when they founded Image, by sequestering their House Style and their constant repetition of gritty demons, cyborgs, and douchebags to their own corner of the racks, leaving Marvel and DC free to explore their roots with blah blah blah blah"

I think I am mostly in line with this sentiment. I think it was the establishment of a non-mainstream comic house large enough to rival those pillars of comicdom that started the new age of comics. I'm not sure, I may be mistaken, but Is this when Dark Horse started taking off? Anyone got the facts on that? When did dark horse drop the furry and pick up Frank Miller? I know I was looking at Hellboy and a lot of independent comics during these dark days. I was leaning towards the non-mainstream comics following my introduction to Love & Rockets at age 14. I knew when I read the stories of lesbian robot mechanics that there were others out there with my sensibilities, and they were producing (and now some 20 years later it is obvious they were reproducing as well! Yay!)
Too bad we had to endure this horrible plastic age of comics for the kinda good years to emerge from.
Hey Ruby, don't discount teh X-menz entirely! I'm sure Pone and I can count off a few choice stories from recent years that really make that haggard team of upstarts shine anew.

Galspanic said...

If my previous statement sounded like a "I was always interested in the alternative because I'm cooler than thou" vibe, that wasn't my intention. To be sure, there have, and always will be all kinds of ass disguised as alternative art. And to be sure, I read a lot of that ass as well.
I think Poison Elves is a great example of this. Another pinnacle moment of ugly turned to beauty is Poor Dave Cooper working for the awful awful Barry Blair and drawing Gun Fury. This horrendous comic was my introduction to one of my fave alt artists.

Galspanic said...

By the way! UGH!!!!

Ruby Tenneco said...

Hey Ruby, don't discount teh X-menz entirely!

Don't worry, I no longer do... I just read the Whedon Astonshing X-men run, excellent. I don't think it involves any gauntlets whatsoever!

Mr. Pony said...

Ditto on the Whedon run. Fugu should be just finishing the last trade now, assuming he didn't break down and buy the Litch King WoW expansion, in which case we will never see him ever again.

Galspanic said...

He didn't. I'm his "sponsor".

Fugu said...

Dude, the first thing you said to me as my "sponsor" was "did you get it yet? How is it? Think we could share the account?"

I wasn't too big a fan of the ending of Whedon's run. It felt it a little contrived and pushed (yes, a place where superheroes fly to alien worlds must still do things that make sense). Plus, you know, the physics of a giant bullet making it to Earth before Kitty Pride even has a chance to pee herself, and using that as a plot device in general, well, it was pretty f'ing weak.

And then there's the age old problem I've always had with these things--why the hell would an alien race name their planet something like "Breakworld"? It would be like us naming the Earth Humanplanet, or Sapienworld or some such shit. It makes me sad.

Galspanic said...

Dude, that's why I put the quote marks around the word "sponsor"

Galspanic said...

I prefer "breakworld" to "earth". I'd rather live somewhere where everyone has the potential of either breaking things, being broke, broken, or breakdances. It's a marked difference where everyone ultimately Is dirt, in my opinion.

I'm not sure I dug the ending of that xmen series either. What the hell happened to Kitty? Is there a tiny corpse inside I giant bullet somewhere hurtling through space, or what? Maybe I read too quickly.

Fugu said...

No, that's pretty much as they left it.

BTW--it'd downloadable.

Mr. Pony said...

I liked the ending. Sure, they didn't cover the details of how that propulsion-less bullet crosses the distance to Earth so quickly, but they've been kind of glossing over how that guy turns himself into metal, too. You know what? Wormhole. Either way, I thought it made dramatic sense, and seeing the White Queen all sad over the strong young female character sacrificing herself to save the world (hmm) was the point of it all, and it worked for me.

Where's that link, Fugu; in case our reader wants to catch up?

"Dirt", by the way. We called our planet "Dirt". Species name their own planets while they are still very stupid. I bet if we encounter sentient alien species, the names of their home planets will all sound cool to us, but will all translate to words like "Dirt" and "Down" and "That".

Fugu said...

You know, maybe it was the bullet itself that really bugged me--it was so comical looking! A giant bullet! That's it! He should have just shot it out of a giant six shooter already.

Ah, I had switched topics mid-stream--I was saying the expansion was downloadable, not the comic...

Mr. Pony said...

That's a good point; it was a giant space bullet; aerodynamical and everything. I guess you're not a fan of the Giant Typewriter, either?

Fugu said...

Yow. I appear to have forgotten my username and password.