Deadpool Co-Creator Rob Liefeld Slams X-Men Office “Train Wreck”, Says Marvel Comics Brass “Have No New Moves, They Are Spent And Tired And It Shows”
In continuing his understandably hot war against Marvel Comics, Deadpool and Cable co-creator Rob Liefeld has yet again issued a public call out against the publisher for their self-destructive creative decisions, this time taking aim at both their failure to keep the former “gold standard” X-Men line from collapsing, their greedy book release plans, and the overall fact that its top leadership positions are in desperate need of new blood.
Offering his latest round of critiques on April 21st via his personal Twitter account, the former New Mutants Vol. 1 artist began by recalling, seemingly apropos of some behind-the-scenes conversations with his fellow creators, “Man, I can’t make folks go on the record – but I can tell you, based on my DM’s, that comic book professionals en masse agree about the train wreck the X-Men office is.”
“Sad,” he added. “Was once the GOLD standard of comic book storytelling.”
Liefeld then directed his attention to Marvel Comics’ leadership, declaring “The guys at the top of the executive suite in publishing have to go – [Marvel Entertainment President Dan] Buckley, [Marvel Entertainment Senior VP of Publishing Operations & Procurement David] Bogart, [Marvel Publishing Senior VP of Print, Sales, and Marketing David] Gabriel.”
“These guys have no new moves, they are spent and tired and it shows,” said the original Deadpool illustrator. “Start over. My career has been across 7 EIC’s. Seen it done way better by brighter and more focused minds.”
Adding one more final thought to this particular thread, the arguable ‘definitive 90s-era illustrator’ further opined, “The Marvel QuotaVerse is what is crushing publishing.”
“Always a slew of new #1’s with limited life, quick cancellation,” he decried. “We are closer to all new #1’s each month, every month.”
From there, Liefeld would proceed to commiserate with fans who likewise felt the same.
Met with the declaration from one fan, “I’m a massive Marvel fan, and nothing they are putting out interests me. It feels dead,” Liefeld would assure them, “You are far from being alone.”
Retweeting another who admitted, “For the first time in years I’ve completely dropped X-men from my pull. It’s been years since I haven’t had the main book on my pull. Sad,” the Image Comics co-founder would agree, “Same.”
And while exact operations information, such as exact sales numbers, profits, etc. are currently unavailable to the public, speaking from a fan perspective, even when taking the most charitable and ‘open to see what stories the publisher might have’ stance possible, one can’t help but admit that the Deadpool creator is unfortunately somewhere over the target.
In terms of the X-Men, not only have the last few years been exceptionally rough on Marvel’s Merry Band of Mutants due to subsequent writers completely missing the ‘political-and-extranormal-horror’ angle of Jonathan Hickman’s Krakoa stories, thus turning the stories told across the entire line into little more than either cutesy Tumblr-level nonsense or blood-thirsty character assassinations (to the point where Kitty Pryde was willfully killing her enemies during the Krakoa War), but the current ‘From The Ashes’ reboot has done little to follow its ‘life rejuvenating’ thesis.
Rather, outside of Gail Simone’s Uncanny X-Men Vol. 6 (I know, trust me, I can’t believe I said that either, but it’s amazingly good) and Peach Momoko’s Ultimate X-Men Vol. 3 (which doesn’t truly count thanks to being under creative directive of the Ultimate office), the X-books have ‘reset’ themselves to the point where they’re once again doing the exceptionally tired ‘people hate mutants wherever will mutants live’ storyline that they’ve done for decades.
(And don’t get me started on the travesty that is Exceptional X-Men Vol. 1.)
Meanwhile, Liefeld’s point about new ‘Issue #1s’ is also sadly on point, as sometime in the last decade Marvel Comics chose to start treating any creative team ‘run’ as its own volume (ostensibly, like Liefeld said, to boost sales via #1s).
For an example of this phenomena, look no further than the fact that from its debut in 1965 to 2014, at which time the volume was brought to ‘a close’ with issue #700, Amazing Spider-Man only ever consisted of two volumes, with the decision to even divide it up into a second volume being a result of the similar 90s speculator mentality.
But conversely, in the eleven-years since Issue #700 and the ‘Superior Spider-Man’ switch, Amazing has received four additional volumes (five if you count the first volume of Superior Spider-Man, which replaced it for the duration of the storyline), with its latest Vol. 7 having just started a few weeks ago.
And do these constant volume switch-ups offer anything when it comes to the wall-crawler’s narrative? Absolutely not. If anything, it makes it more confusing to follow.
However, what it does do is allow Marvel Comics to try and artificially boost sales and profits by attempting to play to the speculator market (Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 7 #1 launched with eleven total variant covers).
Ultimately, Liefeld’s current beef with Marvel Comics aside, he is not completely off-base – and unless Marvel Comics wants the mutants to truly go extinct, they’ll hopefully take notice sooner rather than later.
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