Bleeding Cool airs another recently-cancelled-comic's creator's dirty laundry: The Infinite, by Robert Kirkman and Rob Liefeld, has been cancelled, with Liefeld saying Kirkman's objection was that the inked pages didn't look Liefeldy enough. Really.
My uncle actually brought the first two issues of The Infinite to breakfast a couple weeks back and passed them around for pointing and laughing. (He said he picked them up for a "what not to do" project in the comics class he's teaching.)
Highlights included: the cover for Issue #2 is laid out with the characters actually COVERING the title so that YOU CANNOT READ THE TITLE OF THE BOOK YOU ARE LOOKING AT; there's a two-page spread that's just one guy talking, with the whole thing just showing different angles on his face with the same gritted-teeth expression; and one issue ends with a splash page that's just one character, except you can see the back of another character's head peeking out from the corner, strategically placed right over the guy's feet so that Liefeld does not have to draw feet.
Anyhow, Jon and I got to chatting about Liefeld, about how he had a recent "ignore the haters" blog post that I thought was a great thing to write but wouldn't it be nice if he could pay just a LITTLE attention to the haters who are actually offering constructive criticism on how to improve his style, which hasn't changed in 20 years?
And then we got to talking about the market and the point that, really, Liefeld DOES have a fanbase, and the people who are buying Rob Liefeld comics don't WANT him to draw any differently than he did 20 years ago. And how this is a great example of the biggest problem DC and Marvel are dealing with, which is that any attempt to appeal to a broader audience may instead just alienate their existing audience.
Well, it's almost like Liefeld was sitting in on that conversation, because:
If I want to evolve my work, expand it, alter the way it looks, without limiting the amount of detail than that’s what I will do. I can’t have the terms of my art dictated to.
Go figure.
I love Kirkman but he's got his weaknesses. (The aforementioned page of just one guy monologuing, with the same facial expression over and over? Well, that expression was Liefeld's fault, but my first reaction on seeing it was, "You know, it's Robert Kirkman's fault that we're looking at two pages of just one dude talking." And now it would appear that maybe even the expression was Kirkman's fault, too.)