Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Today's soundtrack: Metallica "Die! Die! My Darling" ::
(Yaar, thar be images in this post! Please to forgive the load lag!)
I enjoy drawing stuff. Oh, I know I'm not incredible at it or anything, but it's fun and it relaxes me. It's a hobby. Every once in a while, though, I'll hit a drawing snag of some sort. Maybe my doodle isn't coming out so well. Maybe it looks horribly disproportioned. Maybe the anatomy is turning out all wrong. When stuff like that happens, sometimes I get frustrated and think "why do I bother? I'm no good at this!" Then, then I remember comic book artist and former sensation Rob Liefeld and all is good again.
Rob, in case you are fortunate enough not to be acquainted with his work, started penciling comic books for Marvel in the late 1980s/early 1990s. He was an overnight star because he was young and proudly touted the fact that he had "no formal art training," which resonated well with the comic book buying youth because it made going pro in the comics industry seem like a reachable goal for the everyman. No, you didn't need years of art schooling or anatomy classes any more and every teenager wanted to be the next Liefeld.
However, Liefeld soon got too big for his britches and "ran away" from Marvel along with some other famous artists to start their own comic book publishing company called Image. These artists were tired of coming up with cool characters for their comics only to have their publisher claim ownership over them and all rights to the character. They formed Image on the basis of creator owned rights, a noble idea indeed. Liefeld started the comic Youngblood under Image. Unfortunately for him, it was around then that his audience was growing up and they started to notice something.... namely, his artwork SUCKED ASS. It's ever so easy to pull the wool over the eyes of an unsuspecting youth, but a full grown adult who had been reading comics for years? Not so much. This audience of his started to wonder, did his art start to suffer after he went to Image? Was his workload too big or something? Alas, no. Returning to all of his work on Marvel clearly showed that his work was ALWAYS this poor, you just didn't know it yet.
Anyway, don't just take my word for it, I've got some convenient scans here for you!
The guy up there with the huge-assed sci-fi firearm is Cable, one of Liefeld's more famous contributions to Marvel Comics. Take a second to look at that picture. I mean, REALLY look at it. After your brain is done freaking out, let's discuss it. All set? First off, it looks like Cable is under attack from the evil forces of Cross Hatching! Is all of that "background" ink really necessary? Next, let's check out that head to shoulder ratio:
Any good or even semi-decent comic artist will tell you that a muscular guy will have a shoulder width of three heads. That's his own, actual head, plus the width of his head on each side of it. Not Cable! He's so incredibly masculine and muscle-bound that only FIVE head's worth of width can possibly contain it! Yes, I'm SURE that there is the occasional extra-beefy figure who requires extra width, but that's not what's going on here at all. It's just that Robby has NO IDEA how to proportion the head with the rest of the body. Go back up and look at the first picture. Isn't that head a TAD too small for the body?
Also, for a guy as obviously jacked full of steroids as Cable is, he has one heck of a petite ballerina's ankle going on there. Someone toting around not only that much body mass, but also all of that crazy shit he's carrying around with him has got to be a medical miracle that his ankle hasn't snapped under the pressure! Now, some other figures...
Kneeling is a character named Boom Boom and the dog is Wolfsbane (a girl who can turn into a wolf). It seems Mr. Liefeld also failed to study ANIMAL anatomy as well. You'd think drawing a book in which one of the main characters turns into a wolf frequently would make you want to study up on wolves maybe a little bit. Or at least know what one looks like in the general sense. Onto Boom Boom.
Look at that leg. Just look at that thing! For starters, the foot is pointed at the viewer, but the knee is pointed to our right. That is not a natural position to be in. In fact, it's pretty difficult to turn your foot out ninety degrees! Also, check out the musculoskeletal structure of that thing. Her calf muscle is tiny and scrunched up near the knee and in between there and the ankle there is virtually no muscle tissue at all, in fact, it almost looks like her fibula is nonexistent. Now, let's pull the camera back a bit.
Standing up, we have once again Cable and Amara in yellow. Once again, freakishly small heads. The average comic book person stands about eight heads tall, but these two clock in at about ten. Again, it's not because they happen to be tall characters, but because their heads are too damn small! Next slide please:
This is another Liefeld created character called Shatterstar. And yes, I'll wait for your mind to stop freaking out yet again. Take a good long look at Shatterstar's legs, there. Everything below the quads makes no sense whatsoever. Does the back of your own knee have a big, straight gap like that? And once more, a complete lack of calf muscle meat and overly dainty ankle-foot area. You'd think Shatterstar would collapse at the knees because of, well, physics! One last thing to ponder:
Beware of the CROTCH SCRIBBLIES! it seems that nearly every man ever drawn by Liefeld buys pants which are too tight in the crotch region and so they come down with a scary condition known as the Crotch Scribblies. Careful. It's contagious! I think they make an ointment for that, but it's prescription only.
Ah. Nothing like looking at the horrible crap that Rob Liefeld has produced to make me feel good about my own artistic abilities! Finally, someone else out there who draws ever worse feet than I do! And little did I know that the answer to my fabric folds issues was to mere draw random, scribbly lines! GENIUS!! So, if you like to draw but have days where you doubt yourself of your talent, just do what I do and look at Rob Liefeld's portfolio and know that it could be worse.
William (still would like sucker punch Rob Liefeld)
PS- Yes, these images are of his EARLY work. To be fair, if you're wondering if he got any better, the answer is "not much."
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