"You Know You Want It"???

So this week, my lead contribution to Newsarama's BEST SHOTS reviews is Adventures of Superman #643. Greg Rucka & Co. have been doing a great job with Superman in this book, and a lot of heavy shit's been going down between DC's "Big Three": Superman, Wonder Woman & Batman. Make no mistake about it, these a not the same cheery folks from Superfriends all those years ago. Basically none of them trust each other right now. Superman was brainwashed into kicking Batman's ass, Batman is heavily responsible for rogue technology that is running rampant all over the world, and Wonder Woman resorted to killing the person responsible for brainwashing Superman in the first place. For the most part, it's been good stuff.





What hasn't been good stuff is Rob Liefeld's current contribution to Teen Titans. My God, I didn't know that it was possible for an artist this popular to be so fucking awful. For all the complaints (some valid) you can find online against the likes of Michael Turner, Ian Churchill, Tony Daniel or Jim Lee, none of them even come close to matching the sheer horrendousness that Liefeld is churning out right now. The bad news ( and I use that term loosely) is that because I did not buy Teen Titans #27, I do not have the page by page evidence to show you here as to how pathetic the artwork is. I was able to find a couple of pieces online.


There's this little gem:

So besides the fact that Rob can't do a proper bowling stance, we're to believe that when the Titans get together to bowl in the comforts of their own headquaters while taking a break from work that they do so in full costume with the masks on??? George Perez would be so ashamed.

Here, where Liefeld by the way comes up with his own original take on Robin's costume, he is so incapable of producing distinguishing features in his male characters that his Robin, a boy no older than 16, could easily pass as former Robin Dick Grayson, known to all now as Nightwing, a man in his early to mid-20s.


I also like how Liefeld has little to no penchant for backgrounds (there are tons of pages in their entirety where there are no fucking backgrounds), but also you gotta love the way he makes the women as imposing as the men. We're supposed to believe that these ladies, the new Hawk & Dove, are around 20, 21, maybe??? Nice, Rob. Hawk here has legs as meaty as Nightwing's -- I mean ROBIN'S!


Where to even begin with this piece of shit?

In a Rob Liefeld universe, everyone talks like they just had their wisdom teeth pulled. For a guy who reportedly worships at the alter of Perez and his classic work on New Teen Titans, he clearly never spent a day in his life practicing how to draw varied facial expressions.
And then there's or Wonder Girl in the foreground. Believe it or not, Cassie Sandsmark there is 15 years old. You wouldn't know that by the six-pack she's got on her that looks like it should belong to Superman. Plus of course she's how ample here? Is she up to a D-cup, or is she a high C? For every page of horseshit we get in this one issue of Teen Titans there are at least a dozen artists in the business who could easily illustrate a proper Wonder girl who is clearly distinctive from her older mentor, Wonder Woman.

I mean, the guy can clearly do man titties:


The cover to this issue read "You Know You Want It." Is that supposed to be some kind of fucking joke??? How does this guy have a following??? I keep reading how there are comic book readers that are still ga-ga for his shit! All of the sudden Liefeld's got me acting like some sort of art instructor, something I am not comforatble with. But on top of all of these style errors that run rampant through the book, the overall art production, even if it was more compostionally correct, is still sloppy-ass as all get-up. The art would've been laughable at best if a competent inker was brought in to reign in some of this, but the suckiness was 100% Liefeld. No one assisted on this, I'm afraid.
Here's a book that's easily in my personal Top Five, especially when Geoff Johns writing was accompanied by Mike McKone's art. The good news is that this stuff Liefeld's doing on Titans is only 2 issues. Johns isn't even writing this 2-parter getting the break to focus on other projects, but the otherwise talented Gail Simone, in a fill-in spot, is saddled with the most amateurish excuse for comic book art, and something this bad could set the title back in a big way. I'm taking two issues off of this book and getting back on by #29, but I might very well drop the next DC book that they feel is worthy of Rob Liefeld's services. I mean, if THEY don't care about the book, why should I?