![]() ![]() Overall, your feelings on this trade will hinge entirely on how nostalgic you are for the early ’90s. If the New Warriors had an HR department, there would have been a lot of sensitivity training done. It’s honestly astounding how far the character of Richard Rider has come since then. That hyper-sexualization doesn’t end there either, as virtually every line of dialogue spoken between Nova and Namora is a come-on. A pre-mutant Moira (who has never been more over-sexualized in my memory…maybe the gratuitous underwear scene in X-Men: First Class) is joined by a semi-sane Legion, an undeveloped Siryn, and a (once again hyper-sexualized) Polaris who had temporarily lost her magnetic powers and was instead super strong for some reason? It was not great all around. Nowhere is that more apparent than with the Muir Island squad. To harp on one more element of the terrible crossover with the New Warriors, it must be said that this was also a weird time for the secondary X-teams. Someone had been told that the Breakfast Club pose was on the table, though. I won’t give a lot of attention to that sequence, but it has to be said how bad the continuity is in the (awful) depiction of villains Harness and Piecemeal, which look as if both artists were given different notes to work off of and weren’t allowed to see what the other had designed. If I’m honest, though, I’d still take Liefeld’s pencils over the work from the X-Factor team of John Caponigro and Allen Milgrom, and his character depictions are far more consistent than what we see across the New Warriors crossover toward the end of the book. Other complaints – overly similar faces, copied/traced images, over-reliance on rulers, limited understanding of perspective, and awkward body positioning – are far more present. For example, his figures are mostly consistent and relatively proportionate, and you can in fact see many of the characters’ feet. To be fair, not every criticism of Liefeld’s style that has emerged throughout the years is on display in this trade. Looking at the art in this trade with a modern context, it’s easy to go into this book with a negative outlook. Sam is still a naive optimist trying to impress a father figure, Tabitha is written more as a collection of MTV VJ tropes than an actual character, and even Deadpool (whose debut occurs within the pages of this trade) sets a fairly accurate precedent for how the character’s ensuing decades of existence would play out. The characterizations of Cable and Domino seem really off given the modern context of both, and James Proudstar isn’t really given a lot to work with from a personality standpoint, but otherwise, everything is fairly true to the characters – especially from this era. And the worst I can say about the story here is that it’s just fine. So while this trade begins and ends with other people’s stories, the central thrust is all Liefeld. ![]() This trade, for better or worse, is a collection of Liefeld’s nascent beginnings as a creative force. The man is the Cool Ranch Doritos of pencillers – not everybody’s cup of tea, but with enough passionate defenders to make him an institution. To call Rob Liefeld a polarizing figure is a dramatic exercise in understatement. To be fair, “Dynamic Domino” does sound like it could have come from a Simonson. ![]()
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