Dear Mr. Liefeld,

I remember better times, a time when your energetic linework and style breathed new life into a book called The New Mutants. It was fresh and new and sensational. The tone of that series changed when you cocreated the man named Cable. That series spun off into X-force, and things began to change. After a while, the new and innovative costumes soon became formulaic. Stripes down the sides of pants connecting to the shirt, coupled with a belt with a lot of unused unnecessary pouches became your signature. Along with other great artists in the ‘90s, you left Marvel and co-founded Image comics. You starred in a jeans commercial with Spike Lee, showing off a portrait of him with a camera mounted on his cap to “catch the wrong-doings of others.” Perhaps it should have been aimed at your anatomy.

It was around this period of my life that I was in college, surrounded by peers studying art. It was at this time that I realized how much learning to draw from comic books had harmed my artistic development. At first people started pointing out things in your artwork, like arms that were too short or legs that were twice the length of a character's form. I began noticing these problems on my own, as well as many impossible poses. Comics bend reality to a degree, and better artists managed to stretch the laws of anatomy without breaking their characters in half. Your poses looked uncomfortable. Your backgrounds soon became replaced with speedlines, and the hatching on characters' faces became so out-of-control that everyone seemed to be scarred. You were very successful despite all these flaws, and inspired many imitators, and it was rare that any of them grew and exceeded you. Most faded into obscurity. But not you.

I graduated college and stopped collecting comics around the time you were ruining many of my favorite characters. I haven't kept up much with the comic industry, and I compromised my own dreams to pursue a more “stable” career working in an office in a graphic design capacity. I shouldn't criticize. You've done more than I ever will, and while I can see so much that's wrong in your work, if I can't/won't do better, what ground do I have to stand on? Yet, as a fan, when I read this Newsarama announcement about the Teen Titans earlier this evening, it brought back a lot of these memories. In over a decade, nothing has changed? The same disproportions, the same funky anatomy, the same overdone hatching, the same lack of backgrounds? In the interview, you do allude to listening to fan criticism, so that's a good sign. I think about those early New Mutants, and the potential that was there. I think about your style and the life you breathed into those characters. Most of all, I wonder what if? What if Rob Liefeld drew realistic poses, correct or at least less-distorted anatomy, and actual backgrounds?

In such a parallel reality, you'd probably be one of the greatest comic book artists of all time.

sincerely,
a fan from the early ‘90s