Marvel's X-Men have a long history with many different writers and authors, but one particular artist is quite controversial even 25 years after his most prominent work. The artist Rob Liefeld is well-known in the comic industry for his unique style, 90s-style character design and a penchant for aggressive marketing tactics, but he has also drawn his fare share of criticisms. In New X-Men #116, a source of Liefeld's many insults (even from Stan Lee) is called out: Liefeld's inability to draw a lower body and feet.
Comic books experienced a new surge in popularity in the late 80s and early 90s with the rise of Saturday morning television, the early days of the internet, and the speculation boom. These three elements were joined by a fourth: a group of artists leaving Marvel and DC to found Image Comics, a new company in which writers and artists owned the characters they developed instead of the company. Artist Rob Liefeld was a founding member, and Liefeld's work on series like Youngblood paved the way for Liefeld's early success. He worked for Marvel both before and after Image (most notably creating the characters Cable and Deadpool), but his art draw sharp criticism from his contemporaries.
In New X-Men #116, Jean Grey and Beast desperately search for mutant survivors after a horrible Sentinel-created disaster. Human relief workers chastise the two, saying there's very little chance of finding any survivors. "Trust me," says Jean Grey. "I compensate for my unnaturally thin wrists and ankles with an extremely buff mind." If one knows Rob Liefeld's artwork, it is difficult not to see this as a critique of the worst part of his body of work: his work on the body.
The style of the 90s called for massive torsos, immense shoulders (and shoulder pads), and very thin waists and legs (on both women, men, aliens, androids, and characters of all sorts). Rob Liefeld took the trend to its logical conclusion by drawing feet as incredibly small boxes, and he would often hide them behind other objects to avoid drawing them altogether. Liefeld's inability to draw feet did not stop his massive popularity with fans, but it led to much ridicule among the Marvel and DC fan communities online.
Liefeld has since returned to working on other Marvel books occasionally, but his style has not quite evolved past the 90s. His characters and pencilwork are still evocative of the 'extreme' mentality of the Dark Age of Comics, and Liefeld is perhaps better known for his past contributions regarding Deadpool than his current work. Nevertheless, his various X-Men characters were quite popular then and still draw a crowd - even if Rob Liefeld cannot draw feet.
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