Wow.
Some choice quotes:
Ask him to explain the video game Halo, and he immediately starts making machine-gun noises with his mouth and tossing invisible bombs. Expounding upon why he loves the movie 300 so much, he goes to work with an imagined sword. “That’s my kind of movie!” he says. “I mean FWWWSHT! Splat! Blood and BLEUYYYAAAHH! I love that kind of stuff!” Mention Kill Bill, and he leans back against the wall as if hit by massive G-forces, making a noise that can best be approximated on the page as “NGGGGUUUUHHHH!” before clarifying: “Oh, my God! The best movie!”
I was going to comment, but this one totally speaks for itself. (Keep in mind he's about 3-4 times as old as most people who do that sort of shit.)
“They always go, ‘Oh, Liefeld’s characters are either gritting their teeth, or they’re yelling, they got their mouth open screaming,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, have you seen a Japanese cartoon?’” he says. “I mean, Dragon Ball—you know, you got your characters, they’re playing on the side of the cliff, and then suddenly a guy appears out of the sky—‘I must kill you!’—and, you know, for 30 minutes, they have this crazy battle that takes them all over the globe, into the ocean, you know, crashing into the mountains, and at the end, they vanquish the foe, and they go back to playing on the cliff. And it’s like, that sustained me for 30 minutes. It wasn’t terribly clever, it didn’t do anything other than kinda take my breath away with some of those action sequences—but that sort of balls-out approach, I was happy to bring to my pages.”
Okay, so now that manga's popular, you're going to claim it as an influence? Even though there's no similarities at all? Right. Whatever helps you sleep at night.
“The trailer was literally just the song,” he says, “and the dot bounced on a black screen to the lyrics‘From the—town of—BED-ROCK!’ And I go, ‘Oh, I’m screwed.’” The character was almost renamed “Budrock,” but Anheuser-Busch threatened to sue.
You go, Anheuser-Busch! I always wondered, though, seriously, why the guy who fucking ripped off every X-Man out there thought that a character in a team book was in danger of being sued by a cartoon company because of the name of a fictitious city. This really made no sense to me. I'd be more worried about the other comics companies suing. I guess I'm just nuts that way. ("Budrock," though, would be an obvious allusion to the beer, since, uh, it's not a real word.)
“It is 100 percent fact that we killed Superman,” says Liefeld. “I think, August 1992, we were the second-largest publisher of comics with eight comics. We beat DC Comics and their 50 to 60 comics they were offering that month. And that was the Shot Heard Round the World. Marvel was No. 1, and they publish about 50-60 comics, and now DC is looking up at Image, and they publish 50 to 60 comics, and oh, by the way, they publish Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Justice League. And then they had their emergency meetings: ‘Uh-oh, uh, we’ve gotta do something to regain some attention. Uh, we’re gonna kill Superman.’ And that got DC into the game in November 1992.”
Fuck me, this may be the single funniest thing here! The DC guys always say, to a man, that they planned the death of Superman storyline, but never intended it to be an "event." Just another story. Of course, the higher-ups saw the potential and released word to the mainstream media, and it became one of the biggest events ever. I'm a little more inclined to believe them than the Vanilla Ice of comics.
In 1991, he famously appeared in a Levi’s commercial directed by Spike Lee, after answering an ad soliciting folks with interesting jobs. Liefeld recalls thinking, “‘Wow, this is gonna get comic books on TV all the time!’ because I knew how much those Levi’s commercials ran nonstop. I’m like, ‘This’ll be great for the medium!’” Instead, he was derided for being a show-off, as fans focused on the messenger rather than the message.
"Fans focused on the messenger rather than the message"? No, I think they focused on the message. The derision was because he pointblank lied about creating X-Force. Simple as that.
To this day, Liefeld is described as “controversial”—it’s one of the first things you’ll see on his Wikipedia page—but he isn’t quite sure why. “I ask people, but no one really has a good answer,” he says.
No one has ever told Rob that he has the drawing ability of a brain-dead child with no hands? Seriously? No one's ever criticized his total lack of anatomy and perspective, even basic storytelling skills, where he could read or hear? Truly, no one has ever pointed out to him that all of his ideas are ridiculously derivative of other properties, and that his writing is so bad it makes his art look stellar? Really, you mean no one has ever told Rob why people hate him? You know, I expected Rags Morales to rip this dumbass a new one, but I guess he must have totally wussed out.
It was very clear that everybody wanted to be their own mega-entity, so I created my own label about two years in called Maximum Press—which I owned 100 percent of—and I started moving more of my books into that label, which I wasn’t doing subtly. I had no intention of hanging around, and it just came down to an ultimatum: Either put all your books back into Image, or you’re outta here.
You keep telling yourself that, bud.
“Marvel successfully sued Rob Liefeld over the similarities between his proposed Agent America series and Marvel’s Captain America; Liefeld acquired the Fighting American license and retooled his series to match the terms of the lawsuit.”
Liefeld, however, disputes that account, feeling that the story has been consistently mistold.
Yeah, all those court records are totally fake. Let's believe the guy who claims to have created X-Force instead.
Liefeld says fans still say to him Chapel killed Spawn, a declaration similar to that of Star Wars fans over Han Solo shooting Greedo first.
Both of them said that?
But Liefeld is a sincere believer whose father and grandfather were both Baptist ministers.
This is the kicker! He's a religious guy from a family of ministers, and no one ever told him not to steal or to lie?
Beyond that, he has another dream project in mind: an uncensored telling of the life of King David, a story he believes “trumps everybody else’s hands down, whether it’s King Arthur or Luke Skywalker.” Like Gibson, he doesn’t want to shy away from the darker aspects of the Old Testament tale, including the sex scenes.
Funny, has he read it? He's going on about how graphic this is. I hope he can fit in the
one "off-camera" sex scene.
