It’s everything you were hoping for.

“Neville Quain: I know. I know I was the wrong man to lead a boy scout troop into the sewage system under Minneapolis, I know that now. But I think it’s safe to say I learned some very harsh and unforgettable lessons at the hands of my fellow inmates in the years that followed. ”

The “man” who “drew” the “picture” above is named Rob Liefeld. Anyone who doesn’t know who Rob Liefeld is is both fortunate and unfortunate. Fortunate, because he didn’t have to grow up in the 90’s when Rob Liefeld was THE MOST FAMOUS ARTIST IN THE WORLD AND HAD HIS OWN GAP COMMERCIAL. Unfortunate, because if you stay in comics long enough, you eventually have to read a Liefeld comic, if for no other reason than to just know how good Jack Kirby, or your grandmother is, by comparison.

In 2004, the wealthiest 25% of US households owned 87% ($43.6 trillion) of the country’s wealth, while the bottom quartile held no net wealth at all. The middle 50% of the country held 13% or $6.5 trillion of the total household net wealth. This data shows that the top 25% of American society holds on average a net wealth of $1,556,801 which is 33 times more than those of the lower middle class, or the 25th-50th percentile. That’s unfair. But I don’t mind that so much, however, as I do Rob Liefeld having a car or air in place of a crippled set of limbs. That’s what galls me, really.

According to Progressive Boink, Everything you need to know about Liefeld can be summed up here in this panel:

“It Will Be the President’s Sword.”
“It Will Be the President’s Sword.”
“It Will Be the President’s Sword.”

Just think about that for a moment.

Really understand what this creature is, and that he has drawn a script by Alan Moore.

It.
Will.
Be.
The.
President’s.
Sword.

Once he fixes all the rules. But not even President Schwarzenegger can fix the laws of perspective, geometry, and anatomy, Rob. Even Bizarro feels ashamed for this. Bizarro wears a medal of his own making around his own neck. Shame isn’t easy for him to feel. But not even Bizarro would dare dream of owning the Presidential Weapon.

And y’know, it’s not so much that Liefeld is the worst comics artist in the world, ever. He is, or would be, except that implies a continuum of talent, one with Jack Kirby at one extreme with Neal Adams, Wally Wood and C.C. Beck, you and me and Todd McFarlane at the middle, and Liefeld and the Wizard of Id’s Brant Parker at the other spectrum. But that’s not right, because although Parker is sloppy and lame, he can communicate his ideas through the medium of ink. Liefeld isn’t the Pope of Bad Comics; he’s the Anti-pope of Comics as a whole.

More than the Anti-Pope; he is the Anti-Sun, The Primordial Annihilator, The Old Dragon, The Ultimate Warbringer, Tezcatlipoca, he who is kin to Itzama, spirit of early mist and showers, of Ixtaub, goddess of ropes and snares; Ixchel, the spider web, catcher of morning dew; Zooheekock, virgin fire patroness of infants; Adziz, the master of cold; Kockupocket, who works in fire; Ixtahdoom, she who spits out precious stones; Ixchunchan, the dangerous one. His name is Rob Liefeld, feared by the Mayans as Ah Puch, the destroyer.

He was the Maya god of death who ruled over Mitnal, the land of death, the lowest and most horrible of the nine hells. He was normally represented with the head of an owl on a human body. This figure of death has survived to this day, where the Indians of Central America and Mexico believe that someone will die when the owl screeches.

Ah Puch thrived on human sacrifice, and was especially revered in the city of Chichen Itza, where people were thrown into the Cenote, a sacred well, as sacrifices for Ah Puch to feast upon. With the advent of Christianity, worship of Ah Puch died out. This rendered Ah Puch so weak that he turned into a discorporeal spirit and was forced into dormancy. In other representations Ah Puch is shown as a skeleton or a bloated corpse, adorned with bells. Mitnal. He is also referred to as ‘God A’.  Liefeld likes cocaine.

He’s the Adversary of Comics, the hole that can never be filled, the unmendable breach.

When Liefeld dies (if Satan allows the pact to expire), others will step up and assume the Liefeld mantle, taking on his form, voice, and big guns like the mantle of the Flash, Green Lantern, or Bush family. Speaking of Bush … in fact, the original Liefeld model Mark I may have OD’d on coke back in the late 80s.

This may be the tenth, hundredth version of Liefeld. Liefeld may be like “Groundhog Day,” actually … time pases, but no matter what he does, Bill Murray is stuck in time, and a Liefeld character’s feet will always be stuck behind a boulder.

Didio isn’t the Supreme Evil. He’s just a dragon. Comics has a new type of rule now. Not one-man rule, like in the age of Weisinger, or a rule of aristocracy, or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.

They are representatives of abstract forces. I suggest that Liefeld, having abandoned his guise as the Mayan God O’ Death, is now the avatar of Alien Geometries, as TVTropes describes them:

Elder Gods, Old Ones, and other horrors tend to bend the laws of physics to suit them. Why make a triangle where the angles add up to 180 degrees, when you can make one where they add up to 200 degrees and get some extra space? (This can happen, in a relatively mundane scenario; on a perfect sphere, you can have triangles where the angles sum to 270 degrees since the lines are curved. Now imagine being able to unfold that sphere into a flat surface and leaving the 270-degree triangle intact, and you get some idea of what we’re talking about.) Even the very body of a particularly squamous thing may exhibit this, though more often it shows up in architecture as physically-impossible buildings— occasionally sentient themselves.

This explains why he draws the way he does. It’s not that he means to … he just has a Warren Ellis atomic snowflake inside his head, shaped like the House of Leaves.

A man built a crooked house …

If you’ve ever seen the man in person … he manages to pull what must be a painful existence off with some aplomb; being forced down to three dimensions is not fun. The very first time you see Liefeld, you’re distracted, because he will have shown you your death, without even realizing you’ve been looking at him. The second time, you will see Liefeld, it, shift shapes from its fairly mundane octagon to… other things, we see that it is somehow impossibly deep and one piece all at the same time… and then it starts changing shape when firing beams of pure killing. The effect is enhanced by the fact that what it does can be visually rendered on a computer, but if done in reality would be skull-crackingly horrifying.

Rob Liefeld casts a shadow that is rhomboid. Fact. If he does not consume enough hobo meat, the beef-sadness comes upon him, and his shadow grows wan and grey. Liefeld has multiple points of articulation!

Jesus, maybe Liefeld is Frederic Wertham continuing his revenge on comics, having hollowed out a new body and squatting in it like Desaad does to Bad Mary Marvel in Final Crisis. Or maybe Liefeld’s like Dream of the Endless or The Doctor: he completely regenerates every couple of years.

Now, there’s no official statement at the moment but I’m going to have to ask you to consider the possibility of a maniac with an undying blowtorch of soul-hate and his own sackful of genetically modified super fanthrax.

This is why the decisionmakers at Wizard World — by “decisionmakers” I mean the super-Marvel-team-up of Gareb Shamus’ reptile brain with the genetic nodes of his Y He-Man chromosome — decided to unceremoniously and unilaterally pull out of the annual Dallas Convention. This abandonment of the Arlington Convention Center to jackals and creationists is shameful and low, like the record of Stan Lee, Sex Offender. Forget the question of “How can we live unless Bob Wayne is there to teach us the true way of all flesh?” The reason Shamus removed his mark from the Metroplex is that it was a yearly haunt for Liefeld. Like Fin Fang Foom, Liefeld’s movements are closely watched, hopefully contained. Like Fin Fang Foom, Liefeld has no genitals. Cross this with a burning desire to mate, and, o, you have no idea have frustrated that makes him. And all of us.

Rob Liefeld. What are we being punished for?