Rob Liefeld to Alan Moore: You are nothing without meeee!
Orange County Weekly writes a profile on Rob Liefeld, in which the lord of pouches and women with poofy white hair provides us with his deep thoughts.


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!" This must be what folks on the Internet call a "geekgasm."

And ...

his artwork is both adored and despised for its sometimes grotesquely distorted anatomy, preposterously huge weapons and characters so outsized they don't fit within the panel, prompting some detractors to joke that the artist is afraid of drawing hands and feet. Though he doesn't understand that particular criticism ("Okay, right now on my bulletin board, I have all 26 pages of the last comic I did and I'm lookin' at hands and feet everywhere!"), he does have a healthy sense of self-parody and a thick skin. "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 did'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."

And ...

"I got a killer, giant-size book when I was 7 years old of paintings from the Bible, and you had Samson standing on top of a pile of a hundred guys with a bloody jawbone, and he'd just beaten 'em all to death. There was a page with David lifting up Goliath's head that he just severed from his body, killing him. The Bible is extremely violent: We give it to our kids; we have 'em read it. My kids go to Sunday school, and if they're preached the Bible in its truest form, that is the most violent book on the market ... it's got violence, rape, incest, all sorts of bloody crucifixions. I think that's why The Passion of the Christ was so great. Mel [Gibson] just said, 'I'm gonna show how this looked, and I'm not gonna apologize for it.'"


Anyway, not content to merely be an odd cookie, in a supplement on the profilers blog, Liefeld decides to attack the much odder (although believed to be more talented) cookie in the comics medium: Alan Moore.

We didn't get the right artist for him until about ten issues in, then the second year, they put together a great run. That 24 issues was as well-received a comic as you're gonna find, I still meet people who are like, wow, that was great, but we had no input. That was Alan. And to me, honestly, that was Alan's last great stuff. Because when Awesome, my main investor went belly up --my investor had a video game company, a recording company, andf a comic book company, and overnight, they were all gone -- and Alan, I think had really dug what he was doing with us, because by then he'd expanded it from Supreme to Youngblood, to Glory...I still have all his original proposals, they're a riot, dude. He's definitely taking archetypes and doing the Alan Moore version...I called him up one time and said, 'Hey Alan, how about we do a Teen Titans style book,' and he went quiet and he goes 'That's what Youngblood is.' I thought that was our Avengers-type book."

"But then he took that formula and just kinda did that same thing, I mean, Tom Strong is Supreme, it's flattering that he found his groove back with us and started winning awards back with us because people forget, he'd fallen off the map, you can't really find a great Alan Moore book from '90 to like '96, when he did Supreme, even the stuff he did for Todd [McFarlane] was derided like he was asleep at the wheel, like he didn't care because it was campy, whereas with Supreme he gave it that Silver Age with a twist, and nobody was doing that. And again, what he did for Supreme was ripped off for the next five years by all the other writers. He's always been a trendsetter."

"If you've done business with Alan, you have a different opinion of Alan. He markets himself as a poet, but he's just a ruthless businessman, like everybody else, he kept wanting to more work because he just wanted to get paid. Jeph Loeb, he can tell you."

Fans do not react well to this:


Mark Parsons:
Yeah, Moore did NOTHING from 1990 to mid 90s, other than FROM HELL chapters, a novel (VOICE OF THE FIRE), the ill-fated BIG NUMBERS with Bill Sienkiewicz, the (ongoing) LOST GIRLS collaboration with Melinda Gebbie (intro'ed in 1990s, final version 2006).

And how is wanting to get paid/make work/produce books a bad thing? Or being a "ruthless" businessman? Maybe if Rob were more stringent a businessman, he'd stop soliciting comic series that he renegs on after an issue or two, thus leaving retailers holding the bag with unsold first issues of comics that will never have issues 2 through whatever. How many books has he promised, solicicted then failed to deliver? Not to mention late, late, LATE books. he's the grasshopper dissing the hard working ants!

Kyle:
A couple of paragraphs after claiming that Moore is just in it for the money, you change tack and decide that Moore is being an asshole for his outspoken opinion on how poor adaptations of his work have been? That's rich, dude, richer than that time you claimed your nickname was "The King" - because if he was in it for the money, he'd talk UP the adaptations so that his stake of the royalties would increase. Whereas what he's actually done by now is to refuse his take of the royalties so that it can instead be redistributed amongst his co-creators.

Rich Handley:
There is one major difference between Alan Moore and Rob Liefeld. One of them is a brilliant creator who has contributed several significant and worthwhile titles to the comics world and, thus, will be remembered for decades to come. And the other is Rob Liefeld.


Of course, Rob Liefeld fans call OPPRESSIUN by the hat0rz:

Mike Hasselhoff:
I think if anyone stops to comb Moore's repetoire, they'd realise the greatest character of fiction Alan Moore has ever created -- is Alan Moore.

Like Santa Claus, comic fans enjoy believing in the magic of Alan Moore, and that's the intelligence of his position in the market. There's nothing wrong with that, and that certainly isn't a reason to rag him out.

On the same token, is anything Liefeld's saying there really surprising, or unruly? I guess like Santa Claus, fans are still happy to believe in "controversial" Rob Lifeld, too. Byrne's been a bit quiet lately.

LARRY LEWIS:
Alan Moore is a weirdo everybody knows that.Im a fan of both creators.I think one day we might look upon these comics as a great moment in comic history.I still dont get why comic fans hate Liefeld so much.If you dont like the SH!T then dont buy it.Nobody is putting a gun to your head.


There's also some "Alan Moore's magic is just like your belief in God!" mini wank, but it doesn't bring much funneh so let's not care.

Then, on the Newsarama blog post, Rob decides to play with the anti-fans.

Alan makes deals, then decides later that it wasn't good enough, torches the previous deal, pouts and goes back to his corner.

He killed his Wildstorm deal, he balked when I wouldn't accept Steven Moore as the next Supreme writer for his year 3 project, He killed the Watchman toys that DC had set to roll 10 years back ... for what good reason? He said he would bad mouth them so DC backed off and killed all the merchandise.

He's a great writer when motivated, no different than most others. He hides behind principle while he has his hand out for more control and or more money than he previously negotiated.

And if all his magic nonsense is real then why didn't he go into the dream realm before he wrote Watchmen and see the future success he would achieve and decide to keep all the rights to himself?

Anyways, I'm perfectly satisfied with all my Alan Moore stories and look forward to future collections and perhaps having his earlier Supreme issues re-drawn.

Some fans disagree with Liefeld's interpretation of the events. Others go "LOL! You still can't draw feet, dork!" And so it goes.

ETA: The wank as told by dinosaurs