Body Images and Realism In Art: Notes Towards a Transvaluation of Liefeldian Values

but it seems to have fallen out of the canon, as it were

Really? I’ll take your word for it, not having followed comics criticism (be it the academic sort or the fannish kind, inasmuch as they’re distinct) in a dog’s age. But if so, that’s really a pity: for my money “The Story of the Year” is a strong contender for my favorite work of his. Yes, yes, Watchmen and From Hell are superior technical exercises, but I don’t find myself reading either of them for pleasure on a regular basis, whereas the two collections of his work on Supreme are things that I will happily read for their own sake at any time.

(If I had to guess, I’d venture a sad guess that it’s not so much association with Liefeldism that taints the Moore “Supreme”, as the simple fact that you really have to have a solid grounding in all of the goofier aspects of the 1970s/early-80s Superman continuity to get even a fraction of the jokes, and such people are, how shall we say, getting along in years now. One day we’ll all be gone, and someone will have to write a concordance just to explain why Radar the Hound Supreme is funny.)

Is “Supreme” as good as “Miracleman”? That was probably my favorite Moore piece, even though it came out so infrequently and I basically gave up on it after 8 or 9 issues for that reason.

On the main topic, there are some “bad” painters or cartoonists who, if they were better painters or cartoonists would be worse artists. I think the best example of this is Henri Rousseau. From reading about him and going to a special exhibit on him, it seems that his inability to get perspective right, to people people on the same plane, or to paint things that don’t look like a 5th grader did them was mostly unintentional. But the paintings are great! If he could paint better, he’d be a much worse artist. Maybe Jack Kirby is a bit like that. Liefeld, however, isn’t like that. He’s just bad, and his badness isn’t a great or interesting sort of bad. If he got better, he’d just be okay, a sort of minimally competent artist.

I guess this could be a fairly banal point (and may delve into murky ideas about intentionality in art) but the bad of Liefeld is surely at least in part because he can’t draw any better than this; Kirby was a stylist and there’s evidence out there that he could produce work that was perfectly executed in a realist manner, such as when DC took him on to pencil Superman. (though I think DC’s embellishers did a lot of work to de-Kirbyfy him there, too)

Also, those fricking pouches.

There is a difference of, I kind of want to say, “soul” between Kirby and Liefeld. Kirby was interested in a lot of things, and never stopped wanting to know more. His art shows influences from kachina dolls to pretty cutting-edge art in collage, and his conceptual influences are just all over the map. Human origins, mythology, prospects for the future, the meaning of heroism…heck, if he were alive now, I fully expect he’d devour Red Plenty and then we’d get Kirby-rendered computational schemes. The delivery is often crude, to put it mildly, but he was really curious about the world and really keen to put everything he was thinking about into dramatic form.

Liefeld is, to put it mildly, less interested in any of that. I mean, he has a history of making characters who really are completely blank slates – purely looks, and nothing else. And he needs co-writers badly, because he doesn’t seem to get how plotting works. His dialogue isn’t technically hugely worse than Kirby’s, but his characters seldom talk about anything much beyond what they’re currently shooting at. He can sometimes sort of recognize the sort of aspirations that drove Kirby in the work of others, but he doesn’t have any idea how to go about it himself.

For me it’s a bit like John Woo compared to Michael Bay. Woo’s Hong Kong work is mostly ridiculously intense melodrama and apocalyptic action sequences, but it’s melodrama about interesting things beyond the latest technical tricks. The spectacle is part of the soap opera, and the soap opera is about people up to something engaging. Bay’s movies, on the other hand, would often be improved by removing the human cast and just letting the machines and effects go at it.

I don’t know a good critical language into which to put this thought, but there it is.

John, I don’t think so, but speaking just for myself here. Because there’s a lot of American melodrama I’m also fond of. Exoticism doesn’t hurt, but it’s not the major thing for me.

On the other hand, not everyone lives inside my head. And I would actually peg to admiring the exotic hyper multicultural mix of influences in Kirby as part of the draw. His work is this fascinating blend of things I’ve seen before but not in that context and not with any of those other elements with things I never dreamed of. Maybe I dislike Liefeld’s work partly because it has so little novelty, after you’ve seen a couple dozen issues of it?

I always thought that the core problem with Leifield wasn’t that his art was un-realistic (it was) but that it was often mundane.
People standing around in poses, especially were the women are just somehow sticking both arse and tits forwards in that way no human female can arte just plain dull.
At his best Leifield managed a rather good mad, bouncy impressionistic energy. Sadly, most of his recent work stayed away from that style.

^left and right biceps

that it really ought to have a name.

“The Broken Back Pose”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Kirby look like anything but Kirby.

John, how about his autobiographical comics excerpted in Mark Evanier’s coffee-table book (as un-inked pencils)? In one sense, yeah, they “look like Kirby.” But IMHO they do have a much different sensibility about them than his 60s-70s superhero work.

Kind of relatedly, I’ve been making my way through early Silver-Age issues in Marvel Digital Unlimited and some paperback Marvel Masterworks volumes lying around the house, and I ran into a full-figure Thor illo in a house ad that was obviously by Kirby, but had a stunning grace and fluidity to it (as opposed to dynamism and presence).

The Superman stuff was strange because the DC folks actually didn’t allow him to draw Superman’s head. Someone else added that, presumably because the Kirby version would have been too off-model.

Again per Evanier’s report, Murphy Anderson did the Superman-figure finishes in Kirby’s Fourth World books. By implication this wasn’t just inks but layout-completion in pencil. I don’t think Kirby got to draw a finished Superman until his Super Powers books in the 80s.

But we also need to talk about Gil Kane’s brilliance in the death-of-Gwen-Stacy issues of Spider-Man! I just reread those and was blown away by how good his work was.

Kirby would, of course, never drew someone just standing still. He’d have someone frog-hopping towards you saying, ‘Batroc zee Leaper!

That’s “Batroc ze Leapair!” if you don’t mind. Ze outRAZHeous accent is part of ze charactair.

“most of the criticisms of Liefeld – namely, it’s so, so anatomically wrong!”

I don’t think that’s an accurate summary of “the criticisms of Liefeld”, even if by “the” you mean “these particular pages of.”

I’d say Liefeld lacks virtually every desirable quality in a comics illustrator. He has no sense of composition; he makes very poor, if any, use of line weight and shadow (which is OK if you’re trying to draw like Hergé or like Geof Darrow, but a real problem for the kind of style he’s going for); he’s very, very bad at clarifying action. Those things are all addressed in the lists you linked to; it’s just that the weird anatomy gets proportionally (heh) more attention because 1) it’s easier to point out in layman’s terms, and 2) it’s a specific kind of weird anatomy that gives off a creepy air of sexual arrested development.

Obviously all of the above are subjective aesthetic judgments, but they don’t come from nowhere; there’s a long tradition of people in graphic design trying to understand what looks good, and it’s pretty universally accepted that some kinds of stylization are effective and even essential, while others are ineffective and inept. It seems like your argument comes down to “But you can’t prove that Kirby looks good and Liefeld doesn’t!”– and I don’t see the point of judging art in that way.

Surely demoiselles is the right name for them, after Picasso’s ground (and back) breaking work in the field of ultra-sexualised nudes?

Re-surfacing briefly to thank JH for the link, and also to say: no hate yet for Greg Land?

For all Kirby’s stylistic shortcomings, the man knew how to stage a scene. You are never confused in a Kirby composition where the light is coming from, who is standing where or what the perspective angle is. The execution might be a little free-form at times, but it’s still recognizable as an attempt to execute a specific action. Even if it doesn’t work you say to yourself, OK, I see what he’ going for but just couldn’t pull it off.”

Liefeld on the other hand has no sense of scale and clearly was never even introduced to the concept of perspective. His anatomy is laughably childish. I know professional artists who use mirrors and life models and even keep swipe files of magazine adds and other artist’s work that they use as reference. I’d wager good money that Liefeld doesn’t do any of things. Hell, it’s even money if he’s ever even seen a mirror. There’s no other excuse for his heads to look so alien and weird. And everyone is always just sort of in a void. Maye if you’re lucky, there are some random hatchwork to signify… something. Mans inhumanity to Man? I don’t know.

There was another artist, Jae Lee, an early Image founder who had similar stylistic issues as Liefeld. But Lee recognized his short comings, took a few years off to go to art school, and now does some phenomenal work.

I’m not saying Liefeld should go back to school, but at some point, someone should have sat him down and had a talk.

Of course, there’s also the unremarked upon issue as to why Liefeld continues to get work in the industry when there are hundreds of more talented, better deserving artists out there.

@Keir: It sort of replicates the gap between comment-thread snobbery and litmag snobbery?

It’s especially odd when you think, OK, these artists started out as 15 year olds who couldn’t draw. They had ages to learn! Shouldn’t they have…gotten better or something?

Especially since they were doing it every day of their working lives…

Okay, now everyone is going crazy. Complaining about the technical competence of comic artists in general is like complaining that newspaper headlines use bad grammar. The industrial process of making and selling the books constrains the form.

Bruce Baugh @36:

Kurt Busiek: The pressures of time for commercial production really seriously interfere with learning time. Learning, he said, for writers but much more so for artists, involves spending time on tries that don’t work out, that you can discard. (Later, when I started getting serious about photography, I discovered just how true that was. I throw away a whole bunch of photos for each one I decide to share with anyone.) But when you’re actually working in comics, the odds are that you have page quotas that leave you very, very much wanting to do anything else when you’re done.

The only reason I can thing of for Liefeld to have become so popular — or at least to have done so much — is if he never misses a deadline, if he’s absolutely dependable at meeting those page quotas.

What this all comes down to is that the comic book system is set up to produce bad art. The people running it do not have good — or even decent — art as a priority. Maybe they just got used to making and seeing bad art and their eyes have adjusted so that they can’t see good art if they encountered it.

The test for this hypothesis would be in noncommercial webcomics. Are there any which:

– are about superheroes
– have significantly better art than current comics
criteria: anatomy, characterization (people look

39: but there are some comic book artists who produce decent, or at least technically competent, art. John Cassaday’s “Planetary” comes to mind.

“What this all comes down to is that the comic book system is set up to produce bad art.”

I disagree, and perhaps my disagreement points to the kind of answer JH was looking for.

If you compare comic book art to oil painting, you are comparing apples to oranges. They have different standards of success. Comic book art is in service to a story, oil painting is not, or not to the same extent or the same degree. So what counts as “good” differs in each case.

And so here’s the difference between Kirby and Liefeld: Kirby departs from “correct” anatomy occasionally, but it is always in service of the story. Keith Edwards remark @29 is spot on: Kirby knows how to stage a scene. When Liefeld departs from “correct” proportions. . . it’s just creepy. Doesn’t advance the story, doesn’t suggest character or emotion. It’s just T & A & Rippling Muscles & Thigh Pouches.

In fact the only way to make Liefeld’s art work is to see it as a kind of cubist portraiture. Hang it on your wall and talk about its “deconstruction of compositional norms”. . . but keep it the hell out of comic books.

The thing is, Kirby was never a great draftsman. He was a great *artist* but it was because he was in a position, in a time and a place with a particular set of talents and vision that allowed him to reinvent the vocabulary of comics for the silver age. Kirby’s greatness was in creating the look, the krackle, the way machinery *bends*, the way ink flows and pools over things– that just got eye-poppingly good when it was handed over to a later generation of artists like Neal Adams who could actually freaking draw.

Plus doing it on up to five books a month, that’s just insane.

Liefield was part of creating the movement and the look of his time too, and I think he deserves credit for it as well as the blame. I have a lot of affection for the 90s as a period in comics, and I think they’re unduly maligned. And I think Liefeld gets caught up largely as a symbol of that.

I think an element of that has to do with the changeover in comic coloring and printing that was going on at the time. Liefeld’s peak was in this halfway photoshopped era– you could have soft gradiants, but we weren’t to the point where we really had full color– it’s grasping towards that, away from the traditional solid-color look and trying to be something new. My instinct is to believe that the kind of excessive, violent linework that Liefeld specialized in was really well suited towards that transitory point.

Obviously his anatomy was crap, but that was never the point, was it? There was an energy there, a rawness. Everything was eleven’d. Extreme in a way that makes the ‘e’s generate their own gravitational pull and condense in on each-other– xtreeem!

Admittedly, it isn’t actually pleasant to look at– but neither is most of Kirby’s stuff. Perhaps it has something to do with the idea that we like what Kirby created and was associated with, where we associate Liefield with the worst excesses of an excessive decade.

Brokeback Pouting.

Take a look at some of the sketches Kirby made when he was in the Army. That ain’t the work of an adolescent (but then look at the adolescent sketchbooks of Lautrec or Sargent and weep in envy of such precocious talent).

So, I apologize for jumping into this late, but considering that it combines two of my favorite things to talk about (aesthetics and comics) I couldn’t resist.

Anyway, I think we’re going down the wrong track if we’re going to use “realism” as a normative value for art (especially comic book art). For one thing, as Holbo (Mr. Holbo?) suggests, there’s a lot of good art that doesn’t work in terms of recreating nature and surely when discussing drawings of people shooting lasers out of their eyes and turning into different gases and chemicals (or whatever it is that Metamorpho does) we can at least relax that standard. I’m tempted too to talk about artistic quality in terms of the”weight” of a character and and the quality of the “draftsmanship,” but even then I’m sure there are good examples of weightless characters (although maybe not of good works of poor draftsmanship, although maybe good works of mediocre draftsmanship). The point of that overly long sentence was that in any art there are bound to be numerous exceptions to any rule. (Two quick examples, I find a lot of Alex Ross’ work boring precisely because of how closely he sticks to his models, and I love George Perez’s work even though his anatomy is only good enough to make you not look twice at it…)

Yet I’m still okay with people hating Liefeld–and laughed way too much while looking through that list. I think the main problem with Liefeld is not just that he’s a poor artist, but that he’s lazy. Every artist has ticks and themes that pop up over and over again, but usually that’s because they’re an important part of the atmosphere the artist is trying to convey. Look at those Kirby panels linked to above. They may be goofy, and they may not make any sense, by they convey a dynamism and energy that’s as integral to the Kirby style as those bubbles that crackle out of everything. Even mroe “realistic” artists like David Gibbons or John Romita use these tricks to create atmosphere, albeit entirely different kinds of atmosphere (think of how Gibbons layout in Watchmen de-emphasizes the dynamism we expect from a superhero book as if to say “Will Eisner this ain’t!”). Liefeld’s problem isn’t that he can’t create this kind of atmosphere, it’s that he’s too lazy to try.

Look at that Vulture New Mutants cover (I have no idea who the hero is…). Questionable anatomy aside, it’s a fairly exciting, standard 90’s era cover. Just the kind I was brought up on. And considering that this is coming out at the same time as Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee are becoming kings of the comic art world (and still are, God helps us), it might even be easy to write the anatomy off as a stylistic choice. But compare that cover to just about everything else on the list and you’ll see that this isn’t an artist who has evolved, or even peaked, but an artist who long ago figured out the bare minimum expected of him and just did that.

That’s why there are only backgrounds sometimes and women don’t have functional spines, and yes, pouches everywhere and guns and swords that were added in as an after thought. You can say a lot of bad things about Kirby’s art if you want, but you can’t call him lazy. Not as a professional and not as an artist.

Hypothesis: The difference between a hack and an artist (or at least a professional) is that one is lazy and one isn’t.