Judgement Day #1

[lordultimus]

Alan Moore: "I was talking, while doing Supreme, to Extreme Editor Eric Stephenson about how, as it turned out, while telling the back history of Supreme, I was also filling in a lot of back areas of Extreme continuity. I was making them up as I was going along but filling them in, nonetheless. I suggested to Eric that, if Rob Liefeld wanted, I could pretty well overhaul the entire Extreme universe as I was going along.

Rob thought I should condense my ideas into a three-issue mini-series. The mini-series would help create a new Extreme universe by filling in previously unmentioned bits of its history. Rob was stuck on the title Judgment Day, but I wasn’t so sure, because it sounded like another apocalyptic story—and, in comic books these days, the apocalypse has become a trifle dull. The end of the world happens every couple of issues in one comic book or another. We decided to see if there were any other connotations we could investigate in terms of a Judgment Day story.

I thought that maybe a court trial might work, as it’s a tried and tested vehicle for a story. I thought I could use that device as a framework and that I could come up with a murder case that allowed for evidence to be called for which would fill in, in flashbacks, this panoramic story of the Extreme universe stretching back to the formation of the Earth. And that is basically what we’ve done. I’ve finished the story, and we’ve got it to all fit into the three issues, and we managed to compress this staggering sweep of history into about 96 pages."

Warning for Liefeld art.





























Okay, in order to highlight how bad and lazy Liefeld's art is in this, I'm going to post one page from the Judgment Day Sourcebook, which includes parts of the original script Alan Moore wrote for this issue, specifically the final page:

Comments

[blueprintstyles]

i've never hear of this before

[thanekos]

Ah, this.

(Memories of an s_d 1.0 post of a Liefeld-drawn part of this, and Warren Ellis commenting " .. you posted this, but none of the Gil Kane stuff? "

That was a period of time ago.)

[beyondthefringe]

God, if only Alan had been given more artists worthy of telling the story he wanted to tell. This could have been magnificent.

As it is, the story itself is really quite interesting in demonstrating, once again, how the right storyteller can work wonders with the crappiest of materials. Yes, in this case, it means blending Liefeld's shitty stuff with pastiches of classic Marvel and DC (and public domain) properties, but under Moore's touch, it becomes an affectionate homage to comics history... a sandbox of potential. Not bad for a world filled with what are essentially knock-offs of knock-offs.

Dubious artistic abilities and bad decisions aside, Liefeld always seemed to be at his best in knowing when to let other writers work with his stuff. It's just a shame that it rarely came to full fruition because of his business practices or overreaching ambition. I've lost count of how many halfway good Youngblood revivals there were over the years which fizzled far too soon. (Moore, Busiek, Millar, Kirkman, Casey...)

[locuatico]

The more I see Liefield's work, the more I am convinced his greatest weakness isn't his highly criticised art skills, but rather something that I describe as "he knows what a script looks like, he doesn't know how they are made" and "He knows full-page spreads look cool, but doesn't understand why".

At least at this point of his career, as a mostly self-taught artist, Liefield lacked the understanding of things such as story structure and panel placement theory. it is why you would have things like poorly stablished scenes that ended in a fight out of nowhere or, sometimes, oddly placed flashbacks or page spreads for no clear artistic reason.

[icon_uk]

I've always found his storytelling to be prety much incoherent, with people changing hairstyle and clothing between pages because he genuisnly seems to have forgotten what was going on on the previous page.

[locuatico]

If my theory is correct. that would pretty much explain it.
it is incoherent, because Liefield is doing things that comics do the same way "The Room" did things because "real hollywood movie". There is no artistic or narrative reason, he just does [X] because he knows comics sometimes do [X].

I recall I once compared "Youngblood #1" to the famous "X-Men #1" (the one drawn by Jim Lee) in that... if you come down to it, they are not that different.
They present a bunch of characters, they reference past events, etc. But the difference is that Youngblood feels like something trying to look like a comic, while X-Men is a comic. (I also recall describing how, despite the name, X-men #1 was just a new chapter while Youngblood #1 failed to understand it was chapter 1)

[icon_uk]

I love his utterly plausibleGolden age retro-creations like Fisherman and Skipper, Waxman and Storybook Smith

[beyondthefringe]

They fit right in... and we can even nod and go "yup, they sound like Golden Age heroes." You could almost ask yourself which defunct company they came from that was clearly trying to do knock-offs of more popular heroes. :)

[roxas832]

The art in Alan Moore's run on Supreme is certainly over the top. But it looks better than this, ironic given how Supreme was a Liefeld project first.