MARVEL COMICS: THE UNTOLD STORY
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"A WILD-RIDE ACCOUNT" —The Hollywood Reporter
"EPIC" —The New York Times
"INDISPENSABLE" —Los Angeles Times
"DEFINITIVE" —The Wall Street Journal
"SCINTILLATING" —Publishers Weekly
“FASCINATING” —GQ
"AUTHORITATIVE" —Kirkus Reviews
"GRIPPING" —Rolling Stone
"PRICELESS" —Booklist
"A MUST FOR ANY SUPERHERO OR POP-CULTURE FAN" —NY Post
"ESSENTIAL" —The Daily Beast
"A SUPERPOWERED MUST-READ" —USA Today
"REVELATORY" —The Miami Herald
"AS FULL OF COLORFUL CHARACTERS, TRAGIC REVERSALS AND UNLIKELY PLOT TWISTS AS ANY BOOK IN THE MARVEL CANON" —Newsday
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(Above: page from New Mutants Annual #6, by Rob Liefeld)
Marvel’s latest discovery was a twenty-one-year-old Anaheim, California, native named Rob Liefeld. Liefeld’s father was a Baptist minister; his grandfather had been a Baptist minister; all that young Liefeld had ever wanted to do was draw Star Wars characters, ride his bike to the comic shop, and hide his stacks of X-Men from his mother. Although he’d quickly gotten work doing pinups and covers at DC Comics, his narrative instincts were shakier than McFarlane’s. But he was hardly timid: one editor was surprised to receive an entire story drawn sideways. Bob Harras liked the audacity, though, and after giving him fill-in assignments on X-Factor and Uncanny X-Men, he told Liefeld he wanted a new look for New Mutants, and a new character to replace Professor X as the leader of the team. Liefeld shot off pages and pages of costume designs and brand-new characters, along with a note: Bob—some future friends and/or foes for the Muties! If ya don’t like ’em, trash ’em! ’s okay with me—but if you’re interested—give me a call! One of the characters was submitted to be the new leader: a half-cyborg “man of mystery” with a glowing “cybernetic eye.” His name, the notes said, should be Cybrid…or Cable.
When Harras and writer Louise Simonson suggested other names, Liefeld took a page from the playbook of his new friend McFarlane, and stood his ground. “Bob said, ‘Let’s call him Quentin,’” Liefeld recalled. “I said, ‘Yucch!’ I had already put ‘Cable’ down as his name on the sketches. Then, in Louise’s plot, after being told his name was Cable, he was called Commander X throughout. I said, ‘If this guy is called Commander X, I want nothing to do with it.’ That seemed ridiculous to me.” Harras gave Liefeld his way.
The issue of New Mutants that introduced Cable—he wielded a giant gun; the New Mutants were depicted in crosshairs—was an instant hit, and marked a sudden turnaround for the title’s sales. But it was the beginning of the end for Simonson, who suddenly felt expendable. As Liefeld’s illustrations of muscles and artillery became more outrageous, as backgrounds disappeared and reappeared, as he discarded 180-degree rules, the readership only grew. Liefeld “would do square windows on the outside of the building, but round ones when you cut inside the building,” complained Simonson. “It took me about six months to figure out that Rob really wasn’t interested in the stories at all. He just wanted to do what he wanted to do, which was cool drawings of people posing in their costumes that would then sell for lots of money.”
Text from Marvel Comics: The Untold Story
In 1993, the industry at least made the pretense of reacting to fissures in the market. Wizard magazine, accused by suspicious retailers of artificially inflating the numbers in its industry-standard price guides, hired a new editor to manage the figures. Image cut loose several of the creators behind its late-appearing titles. And Marvel Comics promised a new, “back-to-basics” approach—even as its fourteen-part “Maximum Carnage” crossover ran through five different Spider-Man series, and “Fatal Attractions” ran through six different X-Men titles, and X-Force members Cable and Deadpool began starring in spin-off titles.
