Rob Liefeld interview on Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics: Part 1

We talked to legendary Image Comics co-founder Rob Liefeld about his part in Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics season finale.

We had an opportunity to discuss Image Comics’ historic legacy with one of its original co-founders, Rob Liefeld, known for Youngblood, Deadpool, The New Mutants, X-Force and much, much more. Liefeld has become a good friend of Image Comics partner and Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman, who was a major factor in Liefeld’s return back to the company. Image Comics’ iconic origins and industry impact are the crown jewel of Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics’ season finale tonight on AMC.

UndeadWalking.com – Nir Regev: I was wondering, on the show Todd McFarlane said you were calling him every night, more than his mother even. And you strike me as a really independent person. So, would you have left to form what became Image Comics or Extreme Studios even if the other Marvel team members didn’t leave?

Rob Liefeld: Oh buddy, I was on my way out the door. I think your question answered in the solicitations in the Diamond catalogue where Youngblood was the only Image comic solicited for three months straight. That wasn’t an accident. You said I’m ridiculous independent. I like to learn. I like to pick people’s brains.

I think Todd [McFarlane] was a great coach. It’s funny the two kinda senior guys in the image are always seen as like [Jim] Valentino and [Marc] Silvestri but Todd had been in the business since I think 1983, 84. So he’d been around the block. He did a lot of work at DC Comics prior to coming to Marvel and then you know, by the time he’d gotten to Marvel he was really a seasoned vet card. Todd had seen a lot of stuff. I didn’t have to call Jim Valentino every day because I shared a studio with him. And so he and I would talk daily, and I had great mentors and great guys who I could pick their brains.

But here’s the easiest dots to connect in in relation to Image Comics and why I was first out the gate and why was going out the gate regardless is you have to understand. With all due respect to Todd McFarlane and Jim Lee… Their successes came on two giant globally popular icons. You know Spiderman and Wolverine, or you want to put a larger context Spiderman and X-Men. My success was born out of me completely remaking a dormant title that was selling 110,000 copies in Marvel numbers. The X-Men was selling around 600,000 copies when New Mutants was selling 110 and about to be canceled.

They said you can do whatever you want with it because looks like we’re going to cancel it anyway. By giving me free reign to fix up a title where my strongest tools in my shed were called Rictor and Boom-Boom. I mean I wasn’t playing with the same hand that my peers were. But I wanted to stay in the discussion, I wanted to keep up with Todd and Jim. I had been what was called a hot artist. From Hawk and Dove, I had gotten drafted immediately into the X-Men office. But you know, suddenly Jim’s doing X-Men and Todd is doing Spiderman and I better turn my little ship around to stay in the conversation or I can get left behind.

And I’m sure there’s some alternate universe you know where I don’t bring Cable and everybody else along to the party. And New Mutants does die, and I’m just a guy drawing whatever assignment Marvel gives me that month. But I had bigger plans for myself and I had a strong belief in what I was capable of. And New Mutants # 87 does not just bring Cable with it, it brings 12 new characters.

The rest of them are brand new villains but it overwhelmed the audience. It signaled that there’s a new sheriff in town and within a matter of months, Marvel had giving me the reins to provide both full story and art. And so I gave you Domino, Deadpool, Shatterstar, Feral, Kane, Grizzly and Six-Pack and whatever.

So, my last issue of New Mutants means sells a million copies. One million copies. Of a book that doesn’t have an acetate cover it doesn’t scratch and sniff it doesn’t have 4 other covers that it connects to and it doesn’t have trading cards. It’s just content. 90% of those characters, are characters that I brought to the table, that did not exist prior to me arriving and did not exist without me. So the key to understanding this is, I created my own destiny more so than anyone else I had seen. The closest I felt was like Frank Miller.

You know I’ve been collecting comics since 1974 and one day I picked up an issue of Daredevil with Frank Miller in 1978. And in short order, there was a character called Elecktra. There was a character called Stick. There was The Hand. I was like woooow! This guy is just cooking. Another scenario like that is Walt Simonson with Thor, who created a giant horse named Beta Ray Bill.

These seismic events that were part of their writing and writing so I had created a template by which I had been successful and kept up with my peers. Not the least of which to say I’ll tell you one thing, my good buddy Todd told me was, “You better lower your expectations for X-Force. It’s not going to do very well. I mean, what the hell is an X-Force? Nobody knows what an X-Force is. Everybody knows what an X-Men or a Wolverine is.” And it was the first time I had gone from serious skepticism from Todd. But I mean I gotta be honest, I think I exhausted everybody around me.

I think Todd thought he was kind of a reckless rebel in the comics industry and then he met me. And he’s like, “Holy s***!” I think I redefined reckless and rebel because I was young, big difference, I was 21 and 22 at the time and I had no inhibitions in regards to I was not married. I was not sharing the space with another human being who relied on me, who I shared decisions with. You know Todd was the breadwinner in his family, Jim Lee was the breadwinner. Both of them had kids on the way. Erik Larsen was married, Jim Valentino had a family. Everybody else in the mix had either a long term relationship or a family.

And I was able to go, “Who gives a s***?” If I fail, I am young, I’ll rebound and it’s only me getting hurt. And I now looking back understand from a completely different level because middle age Rob Liefeld would not act like young Rob Liefeld acted. Yeah, this is as narcissistic and weird as it comes but I would love to go back and shake the hand of my younger self and go, “Dude, you had some serious balls. You know, no one could discourage you. Everyone tried to tell you that you were going to fail.”

You understand, there’s a huge part of this history that isn’t going to get covered until the second time it comes around. But Todd McFarlane was trying to start a trading card company at this time. And I have the actual trading cards Todd produced them as samples to the NHL, and it was called up Front Row trading cards. He said his whole slogan was, “Why would you want to sit in the upper deck, when you could be in the front row?”

He had bought the licenses to Wayne Gretzky and Brett Hull and all the NHL stars of the time and he had done Todd McFarlane drawings of them on the flip side and I showed this to Kirkman not too long ago. I fill out my uncut sheet and Todd went to the NHL to try and solicit a trading card license because Todd is a sports guy and Todd leaves comics. He retires from Spiderman. He does his last issue of Spiderman. Youngblood #1 comes out around X-Force 11, so you know there’s 8-9 months that Todd had been toiling in regards to what he’s going to do.

Part of his pursuit of getting you out of the business, that he can utilize his art in that was not necessarily comic books. And then there were other considerations, other offers. I think DC was was toying with him with Batman. You know he wasn’t completely convinced about Image Comics. Larsen, Valentino, and myself were the three like ‘ride or die, we’re doing this’. Obviously, the entire movement got bolstered when Todd came on because now you had two of the biggest guys in the business. And all we were missing is Jim Lee. Marvel had really treated us as like their big three.

Jim [Lee] came onboard last because he had the most hesitation, and I love telling this story. It is 100% vetted and true. And Todd was there. For months, Jim would be again and this speaks to the concerns everyone else had, Jim would be like, “I don’t know, I don’t know about what you guys are doing. I just don’t know the level of success we’re going to have because I’ve got a baby on the way. And I’ve got this killer insurance plan from Marvel. I mean, I’m really relying on this insurance” and he kept talking about insurance. And at one point Todd and I snapped at the same time, and we just said, “Dude! You’re making a million dollars off X-Men #1, just then buy your own insurance!”

Like, to this day even my 20 year old limited-self, I was like, “Why is insurance an issue here? Like buy your own insurance!” But Jim was also the consummate professional among us. He was not the head case that Todd and I were. And Marvel had gone out of their way to make him leaving as difficult as possible, by giving him the best deal or continue to woo him. We were no longer being wooed when we decided to do our own thing. Jim, I think was wooed up until last very second because he would be seen and rightfully so, as a huge asset to them.

But like I said, in that first year and the way the pieces all fell together and I say it in the in the documentary and or in the show, I mean look I went first I was the guinea pig. I was the perfect patient zero because I had the least to lose. But there was no way I wasn’t doing it. Again, You’ve got to go into the mindset before X-Force #1 lands before X-Force #1 is on the stands. I have already looked at the plastic moulds for the Deadpool action figure, the Cable action figure, the Shatterstar action figure, they were making an X-Force line.

X-Men had never been a toy line. The first line had Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm, all your popular characters. Marvel called and said the second line is X-Force. I was like, “Wow! They’re skipping a whole lot of years there”. The toy execs apparently had seen all my drawings and my designs and my character sheets and had left put them under their arms and told Marvel these would make great toys. So, my editor Bob Harras told me while I’m drawing X-Force #1, “Oh yeah, these are all going to be made into toys! You should be thrilled.”

And at that point, I felt like wow things are really cooking. And the reason I given so many characters to Marvel was out of necessity to create content that people would want but also those deals were good deals.

I would read my contract and go, “Okay, so essentially so this is kind of like 5% is what I receive”, and I knew what I was doing. I remember Todd would say, “Why are you giving all these characters to Marvel?” I was like, “I’m not giving it to them, the deal is the same for all of us. If you hit a home run this is a nice you get a nice piece of this for the rest of your life.”

But given that now toys were coming out all the stuff was coming. I felt like I should control the content that I create the next time out. I should, rather than doing a nice run on some Marvel title I should use this window that is presented to me. The good thing about Image Comics, the reason it became a phenomenon, is we were all at our peak performance platform. We were all you know Kevin Durant, year 7. You know what it’s like everything’s worked for you. There’s a lot of guys who don’t act in their peak performance and that’s why don’t get the same results.

We saw an opportunity to make a move but I was the biggest advocate for it. But I was doing it regardless. I mean I would look at what was going on in my career, and how a bunch of characters that had never existed before were starting to blow up. And come on man, we cannot underscore only Todd, myself, and Jim ever touched the million mark on comics. As much as I love the other guys, that’s not something they’ve experienced.

Shadowhawk, [Savage] Dragon, Cyberforce never sold a million copies. Youngblood, Spawn, and Wildcats follow what Spiderman, X-Force, and X-Men did. There was the idea that now the billions of sales that they had with Spiderman, X-Force, and X-Men were going to be available to every book. And that’s when we realized, “No, It’s us. Fans are following us.” Dress it up you know, and put bells and whistles on it, and add to those sales they did.

That’s why they got a great marketing department and sales department but on our own with with our own books. You know Youngblood had two covers but they were stapled in the same comic. It wasn’t like you had to buy two copies. It was a flip cover. But look without our goals and whistles, we hit these giant marks and those are significant achievements.

I am guilty myself for thinking that I was going to become the norm and other people were going to be able to do that effortlessly. And it was going to be something that was available to all. It’s nice to look back and go “No, we did good work. That wasn’t going to be available to everybody.” You know, there was something about our work that sparked people. And we recognized that and acted on it.

UndeadWalking.com – Nir Regev: If there was no Robert Kirkman, no Walking Dead,. If he never came around, do you think Image Comics would still exist in the same form now? Would you have still come back? Because I noticed in the show you guys became fast friends went to the movies and all that. It seemed Kirkman prompted a type of Image Comics reunion.

Rob Liefeld: Listen, I am 100% back because of Robert Kirkman, 100%. It wasn’t even conceivable for me. I can answer this one quickly, then move to your bigger question which was your first one. The long and short of it is, I was just telling him because we had become great friends that I was taking these books somewhere else. He asked me very politely to put a hold on that, while he looked into something else. When he came back and said, “Hey, we we want to have these in Image”. I said,“Wooooooahhhhh, are you sure you know what you’re talking about son?”

I thought he doesn’t understand. He said, “No ,I talked to everybody, everybody wants your books back. Everybody wants you back.” And that was that was that was very exciting and emotional, because I love those guys. And that was never something that had occurred to me that would be possible. I do believe he [Kirkman] made the shot but he was also assisted by Eric Stephenson, who obviously had been with me at Extreme Studios for five years. And Eric who has done obviously just a terrific job at Image. I think he had a strong hand in making that happen too.

But to your bigger issue, I do believe Robert [Kirkman] has been a transformational, once in a lifetime guy in regards to completely altering Image’s fortunes and its future. I mean, I don’t think it could be underscored and emphasized enough. I look at the trailer for the show [The Walking Dead], the trailer for this episode. It’s the number one show on television. And I’ll tell you all the time like because it’s not a network television it’s not advertised the same. But I’m I’m very hawkish I look at the numbers and Robert has been the number one show or television for about six years. I mean The Walking Dead gets these phenomenal numbers 12 million, 14 million.

I mean it could fall significantly over the next several years and it would still be one of the top shows on television. So what that provides Image Comics is a huge pop culture engine. I mean The Walking Dead is the singular Image Comics pop culture multimedia property.

In a world where Marvel and DC are duking it out all the time across every platform, what Robert’s accomplished not only with the comic but with the show is phenomenal. And look the show obviously doesn’t exist without the comic. And I got my new Walking Dead issue on Wednesday and I tell Robert I’m just amazed he still cares as much as he does. Not because he shouldn’t just because he hasn’t become warped and jaded. And he still goes out of his way to produce these compelling comic books with tremendous character and an impact and twists and turns and I mean… He is so into it. And it’s great because he really is.

I mean not only is is he the biggest success story for Image Comics in the last 15 years but he’s the best ambassador. So I mean on both levels, I mean I love the guy. I was excited to meet him many years ago because I was a fan of his. Because I would tell anybody in my circle like, “I just don’t understand how this Invincible comic came out of nowhere is so good. I’ve never heard of this guy!” And this book is fully formed. It’s [Invincible] like ridiculously well written and it’s ridiculously well-produced and brilliantly drawn by Cory Walker. And the one thing about Robert immediately because there’s you know there’s a language to comic books. It’s how do you handle the page turns. It’s very important.

How you end each panel on each page to prompt you to keep turning the pages and then get to the end and cliffhangers. And then the next page is all about your opening sequence, indoctrinating the reader. Robert is so good, it comes effortlessly to him. But again I mean there’s Robert Kirkman the talent and Walking Dead the property and Robert Kirkman the uber comics producer. I think also with Skybound. He’s taken what we envision with WildStorm, or Top Cow [Productions] or Extreme [Studios] taken that to another level of execution. So, yeah dude, the guy is so ridiculously important the comics industry has changed in the last 10 years.

It is really a different place and there’s tons of new eyeballs coming in all the time. Much of it is generated by the content that they’re getting from multimedia from Marvel and DC shows and movies. And again, I’ve been I’ve been at Barnes and Noble in the manga section consuming the latest manga stuff, when I hear the clerks talking very loud to the customer. And the clerks saying “Well, here it is sir, that’s all we got at this time” and then the customer, “You don’t have the first three volumes?” “Uh, no sir, those are really popular. Those are hard to keep in, and we are not able to buy them ourselves. Those are only for the shelves. Even if we have to wait in line and wait for the availability.”

And then I go, “I know what they’re talking about! I know that’s The Walking Dead even if they haven’t said it yet!” And then the customer goes, “Oh man, I was really hoping to get the first three volumes of The Walking Dead to experience it from the beginning.” I cannot tell you how many times that scenario has played out for me in the last several years, when I’m at booksellers.

And again you just go you look at that shelf and back when that happened there was probably 13, 14 Walking Dead volumes and now there’s 20, 25 Walking Dead volumes. I mean, so yeah, I could go on and on and on. But it cannot be underscored. He is… It is like we had a you know… Image guys all got together and spawned this genetically superior child. And he was like, “I will carry the banner for the rest of you.” And he has! *Laughs*. So there you go.

UndeadWalking.com – Nir Regev: Image was talking about how they had the top quality paper and everything had a premium feel when you grabbed it for the first time. It’s mentioned in the Secret History of Comics that was also kind of an ego thing and that you guys were overspending a lot at the beginning. How much of a difference do you think it made for fans to have that premium feel?

Rob Liefeld: I think it definitely made a huge difference, the cardstock cove, the thicker paper, the computer coloring. And here’s the deal. You know it did cost more but we at my maximum I had 66 employees, when we were doing 22 books a month. But Marvel had hundreds of employees and when you get to that point you do micromanage the paper and the printing because nickels and dimes matter in the big scheme. And you’re a publicly held company.

I sat there and I go, “Okay so I’m getting a buck a book. Youngblood sells a million, I get a million. Do I need a million? I don’t need a million.” I’m going to reinvest it myself. I hire people. I also decided well, what’s the cost for me to have better paper stock? Comes out to about two more cents an issue. Great, I’ll do it! Two more cents. Yeah, across a million copies that adds up but my profits are already through the roof. I absolutely believe we had to do it. I’ll be honest I can answer this in the flip. I think Marvel at the time, the guys running Marvel did want to flip the switch and put their stuff on better paper and use computer color.

There was about a two year gap and that’s forever, forever in the comics industry! That they stayed on the paper that they were printing on. They used old school techniques while we were pushing the technology. I mean I hired a couple of guys out of college with a basic knowledge of computer coloring to set up my computer coloring department. I had three shifts. I mean we had a morning shift, an afternoon shift and an overnight shift. And that’s how we got all the books done. I know Jim and Todd, we all were mutually invested in computer coloring and the comics looked so much better.

By Youngblood #4, four issues in it was perfected to me. I think Youngblood #4 to this day is such a beautifully colored comic and the work that Steve Oliff at Olyoptics was doing was really… Here’s the deal, I paid to have two of my guys go and live at Olyoptics for six months. I rearranged it with Steve Oliff who is the best colorist in the business, that he would mentor my guys. Whatever work they did for him, he kept down there. So, it was a benefit for him but I wanted them to pick his brain and understand.

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And then they came back six months later, and they ran my department, and we got even better! So, those are the kind of investments but it was absolutely because we were giving a better product. Those computer colors I mean it really made a difference and the shiny paper and the stock.

So yeah, absolutely it came with the dinner. It was all part of, “you’re getting an enhanced experience”. Better is in the eye of the beholder and the consumer but we were giving you an enhanced experience. I absolutely believe that was crucial!

Part 2 of Rob Liefeld’s interview arrives post-season finale

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Rob Liefeld’s interview on Robert Kirkman’s Secret History of Comics after the season finale!