 WIZARD UNIVERSE WEEKLY FEATURES |  | [WU CLASSIC] BRIAN BENDIS PRESENTS: ROB LIEFELD | Marvel scribe Brian Bendis interviews creators in and around the comics industry.
In this installment, Brian chats up Rob Liefeld! | | | By Brian Michael Bendis | | Posted 5/27/2008 | |  | | | [EDITOR'S NOTE: Because you demanded it, Wizard Universe brings back the popular "BRIAN BENDIS PRESENTS" series from its vault! In this installment, Brian interviews artist Rob Liefeld about his experience in Hollywood, his time at Image Comics and the controversy that surrounds his name.] | | ![[WU CLASSIC] BRIAN BENDIS PRESENTS: ROB LIEFELD](http://ep.yimg.com/ip/I/wizarduniverse_2058_1956400066)
BRIAN BENDIS PRESENTS: ROB LIEFELD
July 10, 2006 | | Bendis: Of all the interviews that I've done so far we don't know each other at all.
Liefeld: No. Very little.
Bendis: Just some minor run-ins at conventions. So I want to have a conversation with you about stuff–about your life and career–and though some of it will be getting "into it," I'm not looking to attack you. We're both family men. We've both got kids.
Liefeld: Just fire away, man.
Bendis: When I told people that I was interviewing you, the reaction was such a lightning rod.
Liefeld: I know. I don't get it. I'll never get it. I know it exists.
Bendis: That's actually my first question. I think it's been a while since you've actually done anything controversial.
Liefeld: Correct.
Bendis: Still, it follows you. I see you make what would be, for anyone else, a minor post online, and it'll be spun out and will get to my board and be a full-blown controversy. What does that feel like?
Liefeld: Well, Brian, I think you've experienced the Internet ...
Bendis: Oh, yes...
Liefeld: ... And it's like you can't get your feet wet unless you know what you're going into, and I knew full well as far as the Internet and fans go. You just have to be careful. I try to be really careful with anything that I say online because I know that–not just for me, but for everyone–there is always someone lurking, watching. Anything that you say is going to be in print forever. That being said, I am surprised at different comments and things that get blown up because, like you said, I've tried very hard not to be controversial–whatever that means. Yet, it still follows me, and like I said, I've learned to accept it. But I'm fascinated with it. I'm not frustrated by any means. I am as fascinated by it as anyone else.
Bendis: At this point, where do you think that it's coming from?
Liefeld: Oh, man. There's that saying from "Blade Runner" when the scientist says that the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. Is that how it goes? I think that all of us at Image comics were really visible back in the day and we were really, really bright and I really started to grasp it, and this is a real ... Well, I'll just say it–when Britney Spears first hit the scene with her very first single, I used to watch MTV 24-7 and I was like, "What's with this girl in the Catholic schoolgirl outfit? She's hot!" "Hit Me Baby One More Time" was on non-stop on MTV, and then she was on the cover of "Rolling Stone" and you were like, "Who is this little minx?" For a year, I was just fascinated by anything that she did–maybe the better part of two years–and then it was just too much. Now, I just want to slap her like everyone else. I don't know her. I have no idea what Britney Spears is like or who she is, but I've already cultivated an opinion about her, and it's quite negative. She's just too much in my face, too much overexposure, and I've turned from a fan–or being interested in her at all because she was just such a dynamo–to now feeling like it's disgusting. And that's unfair, but it just is what it is. So I think that you can insert Rob Liefeld and all the requisite comparisons that [scenario] brings up. She became vapid pop music and perhaps I was nothing more than a vapid comic book artist. | |  Bendis: But the argument is that you're still working. I interviewed Jeph Loeb before you, and it's funny, but the two people who love you the most are Jeph Loeb and Mark Millar.
Liefeld: I appreciate that. I really do. I met Mark when he contacted me online, maybe in 2000, to say that he had read some columns that I had done and he liked my work. I was floored, because there was no book that was more important to me at the time than his Authority work with Frank Quitely. Richard Starkings had recommended him to me to possibly do something with Supreme only six months before he took The Authority. I felt like my profile was so beat down that I couldn't bear the thought of being turned down. So I wouldn't offer it to anyone, and then I was picking up The Authority going, "Oh, my gosh. Now this guy is huge. I can never get through to him." And we just hit it off. Mark is really a nice guy. He's a real sweetheart of a guy and I kind of found favor with him, I guess, because I was so fortunate that he was generous. Jeph and I have gotten along for years and I've always appreciated his support, but why they enjoy what I do, I have no idea. I'm just drawing comics just like anyone else and I don't get it, Brian.
Bendis: What adds to the enigma of you, of all of my friends, Loeb and Millar are the first guys who ... Well, they've got a long list of people they would assassinate, and yet you're on top of their other list, whereas a lot of other people who aren't as prickly as those guys, you're on top of their sh** list.
Liefeld: It's fascinating. I am truly fascinated by it. I understand that there is the "He's not worthy" camp of the success that I enjoyed and the people who were around me at the time. I told my whole studio, "This is Camelot right now." I said, "The reason that I call it Camelot is: What happened to Camelot? It crumbled and they all scattered searching for the grail." Guys in my studio can tell you that, in the first two years, I probably gathered them at least quarterly in the big meeting room to remind them of that–and when the success was happening, I would scratch my head. I mean, what do you do? Do you just go inside and go, "I'm not going to ride this out. I'm not going to take advantage of this?" We just tapped into something. And I've read where we were supposed to change the world in some drastic way. I think that we contributed a lot of positive things as part of our Image collective, but I'll be the first to tell you that we were never the best artists. We were never the best at anything, but just like a song or a band or whatever, we caught on and we toured rigorously and then it was time for something else.
Bendis: What from that era would you consider your biggest success and your biggest failure? And by that, I don't mean monetarily. I talked to Stan [Lee] about this, and I said that you can look at a guy's career that has had such waves and I know, even for me, that the things that I'm most proud of or the things that I'm most embarrassed or angst-ridden about are rarely the things that people think they would be. So what's your greatest moment?
Liefeld: I would answer based on my personal satisfaction with the work–but that doesn't define someone's best work. I took a break after Image launched. And we were so overwhelmed that I took about nine months off. I came back and Youngblood #6-11, or something like that, was collected in a trade collection. It was a whole little saga and I felt like everything was just clicking for me. Everything that I had kind of slowed down and I was trying to correct some of the gaps in my own work that I didn't like. I tried to improve areas that I thought were strengths, and that being said, the book was now selling less than half of what it did at its peak. But I was much more satisfied with the work. Whenever anyone comes over to the house or people who aren't into comics or are into comics and ask for an example of the work, that's the one that I go to. From a production point of view, a storytelling point of view and a drawing point of view, it's probably what I consider my strongest stuff.
Bendis: What's the name of that story?
Liefeld: It's a trade paperback, and it's called "Youngblood: Trial By Fire." Like I said, it was probably six or eight issues of Youngblood that told the whole little story. I told the stories that I wanted to, and it dealt with the celebrity aspects of Youngblood, but it still had some big action. At that point, I had already been through it.
When I launched Youngblood, and it was celebrity government superheroes, because of the success that we had I was living the kind of Hollywood dream for a while and I was able to implement that into the book. I gave my characters my own manager in the book. Badrock and Shaft became two leads in the book, but were different elements of my own experiences. So that's probably a lot of it, too...The weakest was probably a couple of years later.
The biggest single piece of crap that I've drawn was a one-shot, Avengelyne/Glory, where we put the two hot female leads together. When I was drawing it, I thought, "This is okay. This is okay." Then, when it came out, I was like, "Wow. This is really not done well. It's drawn terribly." I remember picking up another book, I forget by what artist, maybe some artist from one of the young Top Cow guys drawing one of the other chick books, and just going, "Oh, it's put me to shame." I'm not a babe artist, and I had no business trying that. I sold the original pages for nothing out of a sort of contempt for the work–other than the cover, which I like. I guess, again, I have the broke-spine syndrome. I've seen stuff online where they take down my work, and I can't believe the time and effort that's put into the stuff, but the interiors from that work are just garbage. That's it. At that point, I had been doing it for a while. There's an issue of New Mutants that was so late back in the day that bullpen guys inked it. To quote Jim Valentino, "They looked like they inked it with a trowel." I mean, it's garbage–but the pencils I was really proud of. I was late on the inks, so they dispersed it to M. Hands. There is some stuff that comes out and you just go, "Oooh, that's bad." But the Avengelyne/Glory issue, and from that same era some of the the "bad girl" stuff that I did, I was just trying too hard to be something that I wasn't. | |  Bendis: That's work stuff. Now, personally, what would you look back on and consider a personal moment that was really amazing?
Liefeld: In comics?
Bendis: With Stan, one might imagine that him co-creating Spider-Man was his greatest moment, but it ended up that his greatest moment was meeting a president, having a conversation with him and meeting [director Federico] Fellini. It was just a personal thing.
Liefeld: We all have the moments where you go, "Wow." During that period from '91 to '98, my life had exceeded my dreams. And I really want to get this on the record, because the generation before us, there are a select few of the guys that came before us–the Frank Miller, John Byrne, George Pérez, [Walter] Simonson–not all those guys, but people like John Byrne have gone on record saying, "We got into comics for the money." I go, "What money?" I think that I worked up to $200 a page for pencils and inks right before the royalties exploded and what we call the "speculator boom." That's when suddenly there was real money–big money. Then, maybe there were people who got into comics for money and maybe there weren't. I've never met anyone who said they got into comics for money.
We happened to have been very fortunate in that period, but even when we started Image I can tell you right now that guys were terrified. Guys were terrified that Image was going to bankrupt them, fail from the outset, that their health insurance wasn't going to be covered–and I'm talking members of what is referred to now as the original founders. Now that I'm older, I get their concerns completely. At the time, I was twenty years olds and like, "What's to worry about?" I was single, no kids. But now I get it. What happened after Image launched and the attention we got was that suddenly... Yes, Brian, to answer your question, I'll tell you that I was sitting in Steven Spielberg's house while he was going over the score of one of his movies on the grand piano with one of these guys–and this was one of like a dozen visits over the course of four years. I would just get tickled.
I never once asked for an autograph. I never took a picture. I'd come home and tell my wife all about it and some of the guys at the studio, and so all I have is my own memories now–and I always thought that it sucked that I was experiencing that alone, because you want to share those experiences. They're fun experiences and that's it. They're not religious experiences. They're just really fun. It's someone that you admire at the top of their craft or their business, and he was such a nice guy–because I also met some of other people in the Hollywood scene that I thought, "Oh, my God. I can't believe you can treat people like this." And when you've witnessed that whole thing, it's like, "I can't believe you're saying and doing these things in front of me." Here's the pinnacle of what it is to be in the entertainment industry, and probably maybe even beyond that, and he's the nicest and most gentle and smartest guy. And in twenty minutes, I was like, "Oh, holy crap! This is why you're so successful." He cuts to the heart of the matter.
There was a period right after Valiant was sold and Malibu was sold, when we went down a long road where DreamWorks was going to buy my company. The asking price was too big and he's probably very thankful that he didn't pay it, but even then, after that, there were different projects, and I know that it sounds kind of cornball, but they just exceeded what I believed getting into comics made possible. Again, it's just that Steven Spielberg is such a smart guy and I was learning the gems of wisdom that he threw out there. I was just blown away. You were able to sit at someone's feet, the master of their craft, and listen to them just toss off different perspectives and opinions and stuff about their craft and you just go, "Wow, it's amazing that I got to experience this first hand." It's all so Hollywood.
Bendis: That's Spielberg. That's not corny. But I do want to use that thing–because the one little snarky moment that we had between us is that you had said in an interview somewhere that you had read Fortune & Glory or had seen it, I forget which ...
Liefeld: I have and I loved it.
Bendis: Yeah thanks, that's my Hollywood tell-all. But you said, "I've got just as good stories-if not better." ... or something like that. And I said, "Well, then go write them because I think that you probably do."
Liefeld: I wish that I could find that time, because some of them I don't think that I can tell, but I loved Fortune & Glory. I laughed out loud. I felt bad for you when that happened. I felt bad and ashamed and everything else.
Click here to read part two of the interview! | | | | | |
Share this article
![[Slashdot]](http://slashdot.org/favicon.ico)
![[Digg]](http://digg.com/favicon.ico)
![[Reddit]](http://reddit.com/favicon.ico)
![[del.icio.us]](http://del.icio.us/favicon.ico)
![[Facebook]](http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
![[Technorati]](http://technorati.com/favicon.ico)
![[Google]](http://www.google.com/favicon.ico)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico)
|  |
 | |
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
|  |
| |
|
