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"Lydon's Lament" by Paul T. Riddell "A Sociological Homage To Rob Liefeld (With A Tip of the Hat To Stephen Jay Gould)" One of the grand joys of the pursuit of abstract knowledge comes from running across unrelated facts and realizing that they all tie together somehow. I'm not talking about the folks who force those facts together, such as those who "know" that Elvis Presley was taken abroad by the saucer aliens when the world was about to discover that Elvis was the guy who shot John Kennedy. (Besides, we all know Elvis is living in the Roy Orbison Celebrity Rehab Clinic in Sheepdip, Wyoming, where he alternates between small-arms practice with John Lennon and Selena, ultralight flying with Buddy Holly and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and charm and tact classes with Sid Vicious and G.G. Allin.) This is where one asks one question, and it answers another, and so on until you're right up against one of those forbidden truths that H.P. Lovecraft was always warning us about. Well, here's a forbidden truth that will leave everyone staring into space, screaming "Tekali-li!" at the top of their lungs. I figured out the reason why Rob Liefeld is so popular. To explain, we must start at the beginning. My first exposure to Rob Liefeld was through the back cover for a program guide for the long-defunct Dallas Fantasy Fair. Mr. Liefeld was a guest at the summer Flimsy Fair (as those who wanted something more to a convention than a gigantic dealer's room with proprietors selling the same four "hot" comics used to call the shows), and while the cover featured an early plug for "Stormwatch", the back cover had two of Liefeld's women. I'm not ashamed: I took a look at these superheroines and shrieked in absolute terror. So did about half of the people who paid for a three-day pass to the Flimsy Fair and received one of these program guides as a bonus. Now, I'm no stranger to bad comics art. I was a kid in the Seventies, where half of the artists around were hoping to be the next Jack Kirby, and since I had an uncle and a next-door neighbor who collected comics, I had plenty of exposure to really bad art. Most of the twentysomethings in the business don't remember the frabjous days of Gold Key Comics, and for this one should be glad: As with far too much of the material in "Cracked" magazine at the time, my brother and I would go through old Gold Keys to determine if the artist was paid in money or in fresh human entrails. (Because of those days, we also became extremely knowledgable of bad writing, but that's another column.) More often than not, it was a hard call, and we suspected that many Gold Key artists received half of their pay in cashier's checks and half in take-out. Liefeld's art reached a completely new level of atrocity, though, which even exposure to Herb Trimpe's run on "Shogun Warriors" couldn't eclipse. The problem lay not with the women he drew, but how he drew them. Most superheroines wear outfits that no self-respecting hooker would be caught dead in, mostly considering that most superheroines are drawn and written by guys going for their chosen audience: teenage boys and older men in various states of arrested adolescence. The guys nowadays all get ridiculously huge guns; the girls get huge tits and butt-floss bikinis. Liefeld's women, oft-copied through the business, are particularly deformed: huge hooded eyes, two nostrils in an otherwise smooth face, gigantic ICBM-shaped breasts, a lower spine that bends at a 90-degree angle to plug into a pelvis held parallel to the ground, and legs with musculature that belongs on a deer's leg than anything hominid. If any real woman were as misshapen as Liefeld's heroines are, they'd pray for death just from the back pain. Anyway, I always used to chalk up the increasing taffy-pull of Liefeld's characters to the quite simple fact that he'd never seen a naked female, but that didn't make sense. Even with the inability of a Liefeld fan to get laid in Tijuana with $100 bills stuck in his jockstrap, this still presupposed that said fan had access to lots and lots of bad porn, and therefore should know better. This was compounded over the years by the number of comics that featured photos of models dressed as the characters inside: surely, I thought, any reasonable artist who ostensibly based his characters on real human females would have paid attention to how a real woman's spine and pelvis connect, right? (And to see far too many artists comport themselves at conventions, you'd think that they'd have seen plenty of nude females from their constant attempts to sleep with anything they could catch. This implies that any rational woman would actually respond to those nasty propositions with anything other than a Louisville Slugger to the teeth, though, so I suspect that they're actually really good at illustrating nude goats and chickens, but I digress.) What made things even stranger was the obliviousness of all of this Bad Art (Liefeld bad art as opposed to Jhonen Vasquez bad art, which is deliberate) was the lack of response from the fan community. After all, this is a crowd that mobs Usenet every time someone draws Green Lantern with the ring on the wrong finger, so they'd have bothered to say something about the physiological impossibility of a Liefeld bimbo, right? Welp, aside from a few minor grumblings, not a word, or at least not much in print. A few people piped up about his lack of artistic skill, but his name on a comic was still enough to get it to sell like gangbusters. I'd run into people buying "Youngblood" in the local comic shop and ask them what they liked about Liefeld's art, and they really couldn't explain it themselves. Well, the answer came to me a few months ago, thanks in part to Gail over at Comic Book Resources. The other part of the thanks goes to Stephen Jay Gould and his essays for "Natural History" magazine. For those unfamiliar with palaeontology and natural history, Stephen Jay Gould is one of the catalysts in the field. He and Niles Eldridge first made the proposal of "punctuated equilibrium" in evolutionary theory (that is, new species evolve not as logical advancements in a diverse population, but in jumpstarts: a large population able to breed within itself usually never develops new traits, but a small, isolated group without the advantages of the majority's gene pool tend to collect new traits and rapidly evolve, so that the evolution of a species goes for long periods of stasis with sudden punctuations of new species descended from the ancestor population), and Gould is well-known for his popular books on science. His book _Wonderful Life_, while more than a bit out of date, is still a fascinating look at the beginnings of multicellular life on Earth (thanks to that book, I still have an Anomalocaris tattoo on my shoulder, and I have a couple of friends who have half of the Burgess Shale imprinted on their bodies), and his columns in "Natural History" regularly present new findings for a general audience and detonate a lot of the misperceptions of how science works. Anyway, Gould's 1980 essay collection _The Panda's Thumb_ contains part of the answer to Liefeld's popularity. (Read the whole collection anyway: in particular, the title essay should make a lot of people who argue for the "inevitability" of extraterrestrials taking humanoid form think twice about their convictions.) Essay #9 is entitled "A Biological Homage To Mickey Mouse", and it chronicles the evolution of everyone's favorite rodent. (And before anyone starts anything, to be perfectly pedantic, Bugs Bunny isn't everyone's favorite rodent because Bugs is everyone's favorite lagomorph. And you thought you werne't going to learn anything today.) As Gould pointed out in conjunction with Mickey's fiftieth birthday, Mickey had changed a lot in his first half-century. In the first silent shorts in which he appeared, he was a nasty little skell that looked more like a real mouse than the form with which we became more familiar, but the intervening decades made him appear more and more infantlike. Gould used this as an example of how humans naturally look at anything with childlike features (big eyes, large head, short face, retreating chins) as "cute", and are much more disposed to look at them with benevolence. (A perfect example lies with pandas. Anyone with any knowledge of giant pandas knows that pandas are mean, short-tempered brutes that are about as cuddly as a rabid wolverine to anyone caught in close proximity to them, but between their fluffy heads and the big black eyespots, which make their eyes appear much larger than they really are, the nearly universal response is "Awwww!" Not me: give me a red panda any day.) Anywhoo, the telling factor with Mickey and with a lot of other popular cartoon characters is that they evolved over time. Look at the early Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, or Elmer Fudd by way of example: they evolved as well in response to popular acclaim, and other characters that didn't evolve based on viewer response usually became extinct. That is, somebody figured that while this character may have been popular at one time, making a new animated feature with it wasn't worth the money. Hence, Tweety and Sylvester are still anchors for the Warner Brothers empire, but when was the last time you saw a Claude Cat or Sniffles toy at the local toy store? Comics characters and artists are affected by the same sort of evolutionary pressure: the largest such force is in the general marketplace, where a successful comic begats all sorts of imitators that suck up all of the resources (both readers and available money for buying comics) and either kills off the whole trend or causes it to die back to a sustainable level. Artists feel the pressure: after all, why continue to evoke Beardsley and Escher in subtle, mature works with little pay or recognition when the guys drawing varying clones of Silicone Implant Girl can afford a new car each week? Titles feel the pressure: considering a limited amount of money among the comics community for buying new titles, why not throw in a dinosaur or a purple ape on the front cover if it's working for the competition? Fans feel the pressure: if everyone else is pushing you to read the latest Silicone Implant Girl, isn't it in your best interest to see what the big deal is? And so the market moves. Back to Rob Liefeld, after contemplating the effects of evolution on the comics market, I first had the obvious and incredibly chauvinistic thought that "Ol' Rob obviously has never seen a nekkid lady before." Judging by the characters lining up at the local comic shop to get damn near anything with Liefeld's name on it, I suspected that this was true of his fans, but that still didn't work, if only because of the easy availability of bad porn. Most of 'em are already wired, right? It still didn't explain Liefeld: by hiring models to pose on his front covers, he should have realized that no human is able to bend his/her knees backward __that_ far. And then Stephen Jay Gould kicked in. Just consider this hypothesis: at one time, Rob Liefeld was able to draw women with reasonably normal proportions, only maybe without noses. Fannish response to those women caused publishers to consider giving him more work, with changes being made based on negative response more than anything else. After a while, the combination of anatomical impossibilities and crosshatching reached a saturation level, and Liefeld saw no reason to improve his work: according to fan response and sales of each comic, it was "perfect". The implications of that "perfection" are a lot more disturbing. It either means that Liefeld's fans subconsciously crave giant-eyed and -breasted babymaking machines and keep buying his comics to get their fix, or they consciously crave it and will never be satisfied with any woman who doesn't meet these physiologically impossible standards. And I thought the geeks who got off on the green women in "Star Trek" were a little too perverted for safety. As an art style, Liefeld's work leaves a lot to be desired, but as a subject for virgin fetishists, well… And there you have it. Just when you thought you'd sounded the lowest depths of aberrant human sexuality, and reconciled yourself to the fact that some people simply cannot get aroused without being beaten with wire hangers, hung from rafters with nipple clamps, and being defecated upon by quadruple amputees, along comes Riddell with the image of comics geeks lusting after Silly Putty with genitalia. Go ahead and call up to complain: I'm not getting that much sleep because of this, either.
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