How did someone who apparently has no skill in drawing
become so successful and so popular? And why did everyone turn on him? I spent the last few weeks researching
and the answer I found was probably the last thing
that I expected. Let's start with something
you've probably never seen before. A Rob Liefeld
drawing with feet. Here's another. There's some wonky proportions here
and there. But before you go dunking on him, here's
the thing. He did these drawings as a teenager. These drawings are from a portfolio that he had put together at 19 years old
to try and get a job in comics. They would have been tucked under his arm
at WonderCon 1987, standing in a long line,
waiting for his turn to show them to an editor from Marvel
Comics. The head editor for Marvel says
that sometimes he discovers new artists at the conventions. Hundreds of them
show up at every convention, hoping that this will be their big chance. And unlike everyone else in line,
this might be his only chance. You see, when Liefeld was young,
his dad was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Over the next few years, Liefeld's father
would be in and out of medical care, spending nine months
in a coma, losing an eye, and the medical costs
would cripple his family financially. But something came out of that experience
for young Rob Liefeld, because sitting all those hours alone
in a hospital waiting room on his lap would be a comic book. And this was the seventies when comic book
art in America was exploding. George Perez, John Byrne, Neil Adams
and so many others were revolutionizing the medium. I can only imagine how necessary
it must have been for a kid whose family is going through this
traumatic experience to be able to escape that reality
and into the universes of DC and marvel. So comics become an obsession, as does,
soon after, drawing. But despite his obvious natural talent, there was no way his family could afford
to send him to art school. He was working three jobs to support them
and just drawing in whatever time he had left over. And now his father's tumor had come back. If he wanted to continue drawing at all,
he'd need to be getting paid for it. This portfolio review
meant everything to him, so he finally gets
to the front of the line and sets his pages down before legendary
Marvel editor Mark Grunwald. Gruenwald shuffles through his pages. He looks up. Welcome to Marvel Comics, he says. You're hired. At 19 years old, Rob Liefeld
became a professional comic artist. He does a few small jobs for Marvel
and DC before finally getting a shot at a regular series. DC’s Hawk and Dove. It's not exactly a prestigious job, but he's desperate
to make this new career work, so he brings his A-game
to these D-List characters. And now it may be hard to see today
why it stands out. It's obviously tame compared to the stuff
we'll be looking at in a little bit. But when you compare it with other comics
coming out in the late eighties, I think you'll see it's got this
energy and dynamism and intensity that kind of makes it stand out. There are only a few other guys at this
time doing this kind of showy work. One of the most influential
was Todd McFarlane. And McFarlane had just been promoted
at Marvel from his breakout work on The Incredible
Hulk to the Amazing Spider-Man, one of the highest profile jobs
in comic books. I think looking at this,
you can see the influence that McFarlane was having on Liefeld
right at the start, moving away from that classic house comics style into something
that's a little more intense and heavy. And for Young Liefeld, it's working. Hawk and Dove becomes a big success. And so in 1988, after so many years
of attending San Diego Comic-Con as a fan, Liefeld gets to go as an honest
to God professional comic book artist. And it's at this Comic-Con
where we meet someone who will change the course of his life. One of his friends introduces him to this intense Canadian guy
in a jean jacket with the curly mullet. You’re Rob Liefeld, he says, I know you. You're doing Hawk and Dove. It's Todd McFarlane. Todd McFarlane knows who Rob Liefeld is. They actually become fast friends. They end up spending the next 12 hours together, talking
comics and art and everything else, even though they're at different points
in their life. McFarlane is older, married, and serious
life is 20 years old and hungry for success, hungry
to make the money to pull his family out of their financial situation. And what I see is this kind of big
brother/little brother relationship forms between them. I mean, just check out this video
they made a few years later. I think you can see the dynamic at play. And the other biggest question that I get
is: did you pay for that haircut? Unfortunately I did, yeah. He brags that while Liefeld
is still figuring out posing and anatomy, he's busy drawing every brick
on every building, adding extra girders, working to set himself apart
from everyone working in comics. But Liefeld wants to set himself
apart, too. To catch up with McFarlane. And so in issue five of Hawk and Dove,
when the characters enter an alternate dimension,
he has the entire book turn sideways without getting the writer’s or editor’s
permission. Well, that didn't go over so well. DC When they got the pages,
his editor called him, furious. He demanded that Liefeld
redraw the pages in a traditional format, and if he didn't,
he would be fired from the book. Liefeld refuses. Because, unbeknownst to everyone, he had been negotiating a deal
to go over to Marvel Comics. See, Bob Harris, an editor at Marvel,
had recently taken over the X-Men family of books. Harris had gotten that job because a few years earlier he'd
boosted the sales of The Incredible Hulk by taking a chance
on a little known artist. That artist's name was Todd McFarlane. Now Harris is looking for the next Todd
McFarlane to boost the sales of a struggling X-Men
spin off called New Mutants. Rob Liefeld was going to be his next
Todd McFarlane. And just like he had on Hawk and Dove, Liefeld attacks
the assignment with everything he's got. This is an era when a book selling
well meant big royalties for its creators. So his family's well-being
was on the line here. He doesn't
just want this book to sell well, he has to get this book to sell well. And so almost immediately after coming on the book,
he begins introducing new characters. And they do not look like characters
in any other comics at the time. And I'm just going to say it. Rob Liefeld is a strong character
designer. Hold on. Don't unsubscribe yet. Let me explain. I know he's mocked
now for his pouches and shoulder pads and guns and swords, but again, we have to
look at this in the context of the time. Most superheroes were square jawed guys
who wore spandex. Just look at the covers before
and after Liefeld takes over. This thing is going
to stand out on shelves. He looks like he's about to murder
the rest of the new mutants. And this cover is McFarlane
inking Liefeld’s pencils, by the way. They're just so in sync. They spend a ton of time
on the phone together as they work, and it almost seems
like they're in a competition to one up each other with how many lines
they can put on a page. And Liefeld begins
introducing new characters in almost every issue of New Mutants. If he's competing with McFarlane
in this area, he's winning. While McFarlane co-created Venom, most of his work on Spider-Man
was really focused on creating great new visual
interpretations of older characters. But Liefeld is throwing in new wild
designs all the time and the New Mutants is going from a struggling
comic book to a sales success. But then McFarlane takes things
a step further. He gets the assignment
to launch a new Spider-Man series that he won't only draw, but also write. Whether to keep up with McFarlane,
because his ego is growing, or because he was generally trying
to make the book better, Liefeld starts ignoring the scripts
he's been given on New Mutants. This forces Louis Simonson,
who's an incredibly gifted writer, to do last minute
rewrites around Liefeld’s art. And unlike his editors at DC, Bob Harris
supports him in this. So eventually Simonson is pushed off
the book and replaced by Fabian Nicieza, who is happy to work
his dialog around Liefeld’s art. And so at this point,
the book just goes for Rob Liefeld. He introduces Domino, Deadpool,
Shattersstar, this guy, that guy. It's just pure insanity. Even if the plots and characters
are getting thinner and thinner. And it's during this time that McFarlane's
Spider-Man number one finally hits the stands and it becomes the best
selling comic book of all time. Marvel had thrown all their resources, all
the gimmicks, everything they had at it. Todd McFarlane is now the biggest comic book artist
in the world, and Rob Liefeld wants that. Even though he's supporting his family
as an artist, just as he's always dreamed,
he's still hungry for more. He wants to beat Todd McFarlane. But our pages are actually ten by 15,
which is about the size of Rob's ego, although Bob Harris says it's usually
about the size of a double page spread. So he calls up Bob Harris and demands
he gets the same treatment. A new number one with all the marketing
resources that Marvel has. Once again, Harris is in his corner,
so they cancel New Mutants with Issue 100 and relaunch it a few months later as X-Force number one
with story and art by Rob Liefeld. How will it sell? We'll talk about that in a minute, but
I want to use that cliffhanger to force you to listen to me talk about one other
good quality of Rob Liefeld's art. His page layouts. Inspired by how McFarlane
was making Spider-Man bigger and bigger in his comics, Liefeld begins to do
the same. Don't do tiny stuff. You know, it's been done a million times.
Don't do tiny stuff. Todd always beat that into me. Characters are given huge,
almost pinup style treatment in the pages. Inspired by eighties manga like Appleseed, he works to compositionally anchor
each page around key drawings. And I think this is where we start
to see some of Liefeld’s weird anatomy and perspective creep in. I always start with the head
and I do all these ziggy-zaggies. And that's
where your anatomy sucks, right? So because while he understands
how to lay out these dynamic pages, he doesn't
have the fundamentals to support it. So he ends up bending bodies and reality
to fit that compositional vision. And, while later artists would take his bombastic approach
to layouts and refine it, I can't stress enough
just how innovative and groundbreaking this would have been
in the early nineties. Like if you're a kid walking into a comic book store,
and a lot of the readers at this time were young kids,
and you're flipping through comics and you see this, it's probably the comic
you're going to take home with you. Okay, thanks for indulging me. Back to the story. X-Force number one finally comes out
and it beats Spider-Man number one to become the best
selling comic book of all time. Like, this is insane. Five years earlier, Rob Liefeld
was working on a construction site. He's drawn less than 30 comics in his entire life, and he's now the best
selling book artist of all time. And not only are the sales good,
but he's becoming an actual celebrity. And he’s all of
23 years old, and I want you to know he is one of the top talents in the comic book
business, and here he is, Rob Liefeld. He appears in a Spike Lee commercial
surrounded by his X-Force characters. At 23 years old, Liefeld had achieved
his original goal and so much more. But it's still not enough for him
because he's about to pull his craziest stunt yet. In the middle of his run on X-Force,
this ad appears for a new independent comic, The Executioners, emphasis
on the X by Rob Liefeld. You can probably imagine the phone call
he got from the Marvel executives. They threatened to sue him. They threatened to take away
everything they given him. And so now he does something even crazier. He quits Marvel Comics. He and McFarlane, along with a few other top Marvel artists, had been plotting
their escape from Marvel. So they walk out and start Image Comics. Now I'm leaving
so much out of the Image story, so much about Jim Lee, Whilce
Portacio, Mark Silvestri, Erik Larsen. These guys all deserve their own videos, so if that's something you want
let me know down below. But the short version is this is an absolute earthquake
in the comic book universe. For McFarlane, He felt he wasn't getting the level of respect
from Marvel for what he had done for them. They would use his drawings on a T-shirt
or poster and not even send him one. He wanted to hurt Marvel
as much as possible. For Liefeld, he saw the financial side. He saw the action figures of the t shirts and how much money Marvel was making off
of them, and he wanted that for himself. And he's done the math. X-Force was a huge hit
and he'd only have to sell about 200,000 copies
of an independent comic book to make the same amount of money off of it
that he was making at Marvel. But when his image comic Youngblood
comes out, it doesn't sell 200,000 copies. It sells over a million copies and becomes the highest selling
independent comic book of all time. And not only that,
but his celebrity keeps increasing. The day Youngblood launches,
he goes on the Dennis Miller Show for one of the weirdest talk
show interviews I've ever seen. Well, how old are you? I’m 24. Well, when I was young, we used to read, uh, did you ever read Daredevil, X-Men,
stuff like that? Oh yeah, I work for Marvel.
And Youngblood is kind of a funny comic. For me personally, it's the tipping point
where all the fun stuff about Liefeld begins to go just too far. It seems that his success had caused him
to stop trying to develop further as an artist, and he leans harder
into his quirky tendencies. Like, he introduces not just one team,
but two in the first issue of the book. And then in issue two, he introduces another team
and more new characters in issue three. And those innovative, eye grabbing
layouts, well, they're becoming a problem. They may look great to flip through,
but I feel they kind of harm a comic's ability to tell a story. Because while, yes, Appleseed
and other manga were using these big anchored images,
they also surrounded them with pages and pages of rock solid
conventional storytelling. But Youngblood disposes of all of that. Issue two has five double page
splashes, two of which are vertical. I'll put a link down below
if you want to check it out, because, while it's kind of incomprehensible, it does have this raw overabundance
of energy that's kind of exciting. And that energy isn't just on the page. It's spread into Liefeld’s life. He gets a cushy office and starts
building out a studio of artists. He wants the best
and most brilliant creatives working for him and starts
throwing money around like crazy. He pays double, triple the industry
standard to get people to work for him. He launches more and more comics,
creating characters and handing them off to his staff. He ends up with 65 employees
publishing 22 comics per month. He's 25 years old
and running his own comic empire. But this is where his path has diverged
from McFarlane. While Liefeld was growing an empire. McFarlane has focused all of his energy
onto a single property. Spawn. And Spawn
becomes the big hit for Image Comics. It beats Youngblood to become the best
selling independent comic book of all time. Liefeld begins to resent McFarlane,
who repeatedly insists that Spawn is more valuable and more important
than the rest of the Image lineup. And while Spawn is shipping regularly, Youngblood is slipping further
and further behind. Liefeld takes over a year to publish the first five issues
and almost another full year before Issue six comes out. McFarlane yells at Liefeld
because his inability to ship on time is giving all of Image
a bad reputation with retailers. Liefeld For his part, begins referring to McFarlane
as the scolder in chief of Image Comics. Tensions between Liefeld
and McFarlane were at a breaking point, and while I can't know what he was
thinking, the next thing he does seems like it was intentionally designed
to get back at McFarlane. See, since the departure of the Image
artist, Marvel had been struggling with sales,
just as McFarlane had hoped. There are a lot of causes of that
as the gimmicks and bad storytelling of the nineties
had finally caught up with them. But now new leadership had come in
and was looking for a radical way to shake things up. And so they reach out to Todd McFarlane
and supposedly offer him $3 million to come back
and take over some of their failing books. He turned them down point blank. Marvel was the enemy and no amount of
money was about to change his mind. But then shortly after, he finds out
that someone did take that offer. Rob Liefeld. Rob Liefeld is going to take over
Captain America for $3 million. It was a clear betrayal of McFarlane's vision for Image Comics, of his desire
to hurt Marvel as much as possible. Liefeld had gotten his revenge,
but it would cost him. In a unanimous vote of the Image partners,
he was fired. Or he quit. There's some debate, sources are below, but either way, the result was a messy
divorce between Liefeld and McFarlane. The man who inspired him, who became
his friend, his friendly competitor, his partner in business was now
is number one enemy. He had given it all up for this job
at Marvel. Was it worth it? Probably not, because things start
going wrong almost right away. Liefeld's Captain America and Marvel's
whole new direction is heavily criticized. It's during this period
that Liefeld produces this infamous drawing that would end up
haunting him for the rest of his career. And then Marvel declares bankruptcy. Again, there's a lot of causes for that
besides comics sales, and maybe that's a good topic
for a future video. What matters is that new leadership
comes in and they do not like Rob Liefeld, and so his Captain America
run is cut short after only six issues. After giving up so much for this job
at Marvel, he had now lost Marvel too. And McFarlane, bitter over their dispute, uses every opportunity
to tarnish Liefeld’s reputation. He says everything you need to know about
Rob Liefeld is in his name. He robs. He lies and he fails.
And it works. Liefeld's
reputation continues to deteriorate. Articles accusing him of swiping art
of being unable to draw go viral. A whole cottage industry pops up of memes
about his inability to draw. And the aw shucks,
I'm-just-happy-to-be-here persona disappears. His public persona
becomes brash and confrontational. He gets into fights on social media with other creators over credit
or other comments he's made. He promises new projects that take years
to materialize or just never come out. To me, he seems bitter. Success had come so quickly and evaporated
just as quickly. And all the while,
McFarlane continues to succeed. Image becomes a huge success. McFarlane's toy business revolutionizes
the action figure market. It becomes a serious challenger
to established toy companies, so much so that he gradually hands off
more and more of the creative responsibilities on Spawn
so he can focus on toys. And its here, I think, that
we find the final clue to Liefeld’s secret to success, because while McFarlane
stopped drawing comics, Liefeld never did. He's still drawing comics today,
drawing comics for Marvel and DC. Why? I can't imagine he needs the money, and every issue he releases
just brings out more of his detractors. Because this is his real secret. X-Men 108, John Byrne’s very first issue of the X-Men,
the X-Men are battling the Shi’ar off-planet
and there’s a cosmic disturbance... Rob Liefeld loves comics
so much, more than almost anyone else, and for a brief period, that love
made it into his work and it was enough to overcome all of his technical
shortcomings and make him a superstar. But that very success would corrupt him. It would cost him
his audience, his business, his reputation and his friendships. But the story doesn't end on a sad note,
because in the last few years, he seems to have lightened up,
learned to laugh and enjoy success, enjoy drawing comics, and most importantly,
to repair some long lost friendships. I meet 23 year olds today and I got, oh my gosh, I was such a dumbass. I can’t believe I was doing
what I was doing. In charge! I would never put that guy in charge! Let me just jump to the point,
I get really reflective Thank you guys so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, you can really help out by sharing it
with a friend or on social media. I'll see you guys soon.
