The guy has a real excitement and energy to his work, but... his anatomy... just ain't that great.
But much like many writers simply need a good editor, Rob Liefeld just needs... me. Most of his mistakes are pretty obvious to anyone who's taken a life-drawing class (as I have), so it's not all that difficult to fix a lot of his figures. The idea here is that I'm trying to do as little redrawing as possible, just moving things around. Unless redrawing is really needed.
Please understand that I'm not doing this to show off my drawing skills. I'm really more of a writer. Which is kind of a sad commentary on Liefeld's figure drawing, if I can improve on his work.
The most notorious example of Liefeld butchery is a pin-up he did of Captain America, in connection with the "Heroes Reborn" stunt that Marvel did in the 90s, letting Rob and Jim Lee take over a few of their flagship characters for a year. Now, Rob admits that he screwed this one up, and acknowledges that Cap's "boobs" are too big. But that's not really the problem. The main problem is that his ribcage sticks out too far, and his pelvis and everything else are lined up under it, rather than still being connected to his spine. There were a few too many muscles, and his left shoulder really should be visible based on the angle of his chest. Thanks to that wonderful perfectly circular shield, which covers a multitude of sins, this was easy to fix. It took me half an hour.
After posting my version of Cap in a few places, I was encouraged to do more. This next character was the first one who came to find. I don't know this Enchantress character... but I'm pretty sure her legs were too long, and her torso was incapable of supporting life, let alone her upper body. Centering her head on her shoulders and balancing her breasts helps, as does fixing the lengths of her arms and enlarging one of her hands. The costume and hairstyle are more than a little silly too, but that's a design decision, not an illustration problem, so I'm leaving them as is. But I had to fix her foot.
It'd be easy to assume from the above two corrections that Liefeld draws his characters too tall, but that's not necessarily true, as this fix-up of Cable demonstrates. I had to stretch him to include a pelvis, for example. The head was, of course too small also. I tucked his trigger hand to a position where I'd expect the gun's handle to actually be found. (I'm guessing his pencils were unclear, and the inker didn't understand what to ink and what to erase.) When it comes to feet and lower legs... I'm discovering that sometimes there's no solution but to redraw them. Not that I'm a foot expert, but I think this is a... step in the right direction.
The Liefeld approach to drawing women is obviously sexist, but I don't think that being anti-sexist means being anti-sexy. Giving this poor woman reconstructive surgery on her spine and abdomen adds to her sexiness, I think. But then, I'm not a 12-year-old boy, so what do I know about female sex appeal?
Much to my surprise, after repositioning Siryn's left arm to a less dislocated angle, I found that I had to make one of her breasts a little larger. Obviously the oversized hair was the biggest problem to fix. Same with the "cape". (The costume is a little hard to understand, even after looking at a few other drawings of the character for reference. But to be fair, it's never been made clear how exactly Superman's cape is attached, either.) I ended up having to move and/or rescale parts of all four limbs, and resorted to redrawing bits all over the place. Including the feet, of course. To be fair, some of the things I redid weren't Liefeld's work, like reinterpetting the use of color to indicate shadow instead of... whatever it was doing before.
