Anonymous
asked:
I recall a long period where Marvel essentially put out pinup books by Rob Liefeld and other hot at the moment artists just because they sold immensely well. Yet you wouldn't hire most of those artists today, would you? The artwork was inferior but hot back then, but you still printed it because you knew it would sell to a certain audience, so Marvel does compromise its artistic integrity and publish subpar work because numbers will buy it, even if there are better talents out there.

I think you’re making an aesthetic judgment here based upon your own tastes.

Like it or not, Rob Liefeld is a creator whose work has been in demand for a quarter-century now. As we spoke about yesterday, you can’t fool people into liking something–it either appeals to them or it doesn’t.

So while there are certain technical aspects of drawing that you can find fault with in Rob’s work, the plusses of what he brings to the page–the energy, the dynamism, the enthusiasm–outweigh the negatives, at least for a whole lot of readers.

Hiring somebody that the audience likes and responds to isn’t compromising any artistic integrity. As I say here all the time, not every comic is for every reader. And that includes me. We should publish a wide variety of material for a wide variety of tastes.

There are artists from that period who’d have a hard time finding work today, but Rob isn’t one of them. (And pretty much any of the guys whose names you remember aren’t one of them.)

“Better” is subjective. It’s not the purpose of Marvel Comics to educate (although that happens from time to time), it’s to entertain.

Our operating philosophy is that good, strong, well-executed accessible material will sell better than bad, weak, poorly-executed in accessible material. But within that, every one of our editors has their own likes and dislikes. So we publish a variety of different types of artwork, everything from Bryan Hitch to Peter Bagge to Humberto Ramos to David Aja to Mike Allred to Jae Lee. Some of it you like, some of it you’re indifferent to, and some of it you hate. But as long as there’s an audience for it, we’re going to provide for that audience.