When I was a nascent comics fan in the mid-1990s, one of the most important things I learned about the art was that Rob Liefeld can’t draw feet.
Since then, I’ve learned that the former Marvel Comics wunderkind who created X-Force and one of the founding members of Image Comics also can’t draw women, men, guns, pouches, and quite a few other things. In addition, by not fixing these kinds of errors, I always got the impression that he didn’t seem to care that he was a bad artist; one family friend of his told me back then that he was “laughing all the way to the bank.”
Even now, after all these years, my impression of Liefeld and his work has never been a positive one… until now.
Last week, the lads at Penny Arcade revealed that they’d been asked (or even possibly hired) to produce two pieces of art to promote a new Xbox game called Comic Jumper: The Adventures of Captain Smiley from indie game studio Twisted Pixel. The premise of the game is that you play a comic book character who has to battle villains through different genres and comic book styles.
The part that caught PA artist Mike Krahulik’s eye is that as the character jumps into another genre, the art style of the game changes as well. He agreed to do the artwork provided that he could choose the style he would illustrate and he chose the Modern era.
Krahulik has said before at PAX panels and elsewhere that he loved comic books when he was younger and wanted to create his own work. In the news post announcing the debut of the artwork and a subsequent contest to win the Xbox pictured at left, he wrote:
The result [of my work for Twisted Pixel] was a project heavily inspired by one Mr. Rob Liefeld. Obviously you can look back on that stuff now and it’s pretty silly but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being heavily inspired by it at the time. Rob may not have had the best grasp of anatomy, storytelling, perspective, or composition but his shit was fucking dynamic and as a young man I ate it up.
This isn’t the first time the guys have picked on Liefeld, either, as you can see from this comic from 2004, posted right after they’d returned from that year’s San Diego Comic Con.
When I returned to the PA website the day after the contest ended, in addition to the winning entry, we were greeted with Liefeld’s own entry into the contest:
Again… well played, Mr. Liefeld.