Abstract
This chapter looks at the meteoric rise and rapid fall of one of the most popular superhero comic book creators of the 1990s, Rob Liefeld, whose name has become synonymous in some circles with “bad comics.” This chapter asks how Liefeld’s aesthetics, once among the most popular creators working in the form, can be reconciled with the dominant understandings of comics as literature as they dominated contemporary discussions of the form.
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Notes
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To be precise, 99,392; this figure was computed by averaging the ten bestselling comics each month during 2014 from Comichron’s monthly sales charts (http://www.comichron.com/monthlycomicssales/2014.html). As usual with direct market sales data, however, note that these reflect sales to comic book stores not sales to individual readers.
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Scott Jeffery, “Superhuman, Transhuman, Post/Human: Mapping the Porduction and Reception of the Posthuman Body” (PhD diss., University of Stirling, 2013), 166.
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Jeffery, “Posthuman Body,” 166; Bill Hanstock and Brandon Stroud, “The 40 Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings,” Progressive Boink, April 21, 2012, http://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/4/21/2960508/worst-rob-liefeld-drawings, first published November 14, 2007. See also Hanstock, “40 MORE of the Worst Rob Liefeld Drawings,” Progressive Boink (June 14, 2012), http://www.progressiveboink.com/2012/6/14/3084348/the-second–40-worst-rob-liefeld-drawings
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Hanstock, “40 More”, under 36.
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Liefeld, Inkstuds.
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Liefeld, Comic Book Greats.
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Liefeld, Inkstuds.
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Neil Cohn, Amaro Taylor-Weiner, and Suzanne Grossman, “Framing Attention in Japanese and American Comics: Cross-Cultural Differences in Attentional Structure,” Frontiers in Psychology (2012), doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00349.
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Nybakken, “Too Rare,” 34.
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Humphrey, “Bye Bye Marvel,” 11. Kirby, who passed away in 1994, shortly after the creation of Image Comics, never worked for the company.
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Benjamin Woo, “Why Is It So Hard to Think of Comics about Labour?” Comics Forum (December 9, 2013), http://comicsforum.org/2013/12/09/why-is-it-so-hard-to-think-about-comics-as-labour-by-benjamin-woo/
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Henry Jenkins, “Searching for the Origami Unicorn,” in Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 93–130.
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Beaty, B., Woo, B. (2016). By Rob Liefeld?. In: The Greatest Comic Book of All Time. Palgrave Studies in Comics and Graphic Novels. Palgrave Pivot, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53162-9_7
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