1900HOTDOG

Teamworking Day: Rob Liefeld's Shrink!

Added 2024-12-13 13:00:11 +0000 UTC

Brockway: You know Rob Liefeld. He’s the official comic book artist of the worst parts of the 1990s. He’s the guy with the opposite of a foot fetish. He created Youngblood, the superhero team with guns and pouches. He created Deadpool, so he’s responsible by proxy for most of the sexual harassment at Comic Con. Today we’re focusing on a lesser-known piece of his work, 2001’s Shrink! A comic strip about a psychiatrist who treats superheroes.

Seanbaby: It's an unthinkable idea from birth. The trap door was specifically invented for when someone comes into your office and starts to say, "a Rob Liefeld comic strip about a psychiatrist who treats superheroes." It would take so much self-awareness for this concept to work, and Rob Liefeld got rich drawing like an untalented 6th grader who somehow unlearned how to draw during his job as a professional artist. Everything he does looks like wrong shapes having an argument, but less symmetrical than I'm making it sound. He draws like someone forgetting what humans look like at gunpoint. His art is a cross between disinterest and diabetic seizure, but diabetes would care more about feet. His writing isn't quite as good. Which means Shrink! is going to be great!

Brockway: There actually was an interesting version of this premise way back in 1993. And it was not by Rob Liefeld. X-Factor #87, written by hot dog favorite Peter David, was a low-key character heavy story where the members of X-Factor sat down with a psychiatrist and explored their various neuroses and traumas. It was a solid execution on an interesting premise, and it was drawn by Joe Quesada, so everyone had normal length torsos. Then Rob Liefeld stole it, made it worse in every way, and waited for the money to roll in. Reader, I’m going to restore just a tiny bit of your faith in this world. The money did not roll in for this:

Brockway: I know you’re instinctively scrolling down, looking for the next panel, or any kind of payoff. No, this is it. This is a single panel attempted Marmaduke. This is an aborted Ziggy. This is a wet napkin Bil Keane would write “good try” on because you can’t flunk people out of a Special Guest Workshop on a Celibacy Cruise. Every single installment of Shrink! is a strained visual pun that wouldn’t make it out of a popsicle stick writer’s room.

Seanbaby: If a horse wrote this you would shoot it. It's such a violent amount of terrible. The idea "superhero who is just exactly Frosty the Snowman" shouldn't be an option for a human brain. If you suggested this while another person ate a diaper, I would call the two of you The Equally Bad Idea Boys. And this goddamn caption. If this caption occurred to you while a snowman had its icy hands around your throat, you'd spend your last second thinking, "No, I have time to come up with something better than that."

So this is as bad as a thing can be, obviously, but we haven't yet considered the uniquely Liefeldian failures. Rob only knows how to draw the one sexy executive assistant, and I'd argue no he doesn't, so Rob can't even do a gag where she is wearing winter clothes. I'm not saying it'd be funny, but it's champion levels of lazy to not consider how a nude ice pervert might affect room temperature. She's wearing a leotard and miniskirt. I understand that's a therapist's uniform, but she would be fucking freezing.

And what is that expression on her face? Contempt? Asleep? This lady is vomiting ice puns but she looks like she was left for dead after a hair burglary. And, of course, every last foot on every last character is desperately hidden off frame, so the layout is, in graphic design terms, dogshit. And I get that's enough, but are they in a mud cube? A cardboard box? If you're looking to recreate this look for your own office, any furniture salesman would tell you, "That's not furniture, not human anyway. Get this out of my store." I think my point is this was at least a tie for worst comic strip possible before Rob Liefeld drew it, and then it got worse.

Seanbaby: Oh, good. Her office has a wooden playground slide in case any of her clients are fireball monsters.

Brockway: That’s because he’s in the hot seat. Somewhere Rob Liefeld just punched a hole in drywall because he can’t handle being upstaged.

Seanbaby: This could be the least effort ever gone into an endeavor. I hope every single one of these is just a generic Something Man making three clumsy, random cliches about whatever his something is. Like some cowboy on 7/19ths of a granite loveseat telling the sexy teen, "When people shoot off their mouth, I jump the gun and my milk squirting gets udder-ly ridiculous!" He'd have to be that kind of cow because Rob Liefeld only knows how to draw hooves.

Brockway: Rob, let’s put aside everything else you’ve done wrong here and in your creative life in general: The gag was to draw a huge guy crammed into a tiny office. Then you made both the office and couch giant-sized. You set your own bar, Rob. And when you tried to clear that bar you caught your ballsack on it, crashed into a pie cart, and had the bar land inside your asshole with a comical “SPROING!”

Seanbaby: This caption is a torment. It's not a joke or a pun. It's something you'd say from a neck collar after a wizard announced, "Through forbidden rites lost to time, I now have the means to remove a man's soul. Perhaps a demonstration is in order?" I mean, look at Mr. Everest. He's eight or nine body parts fused lawlessly together, two of them hooves, on a couchish blob of black hot dog skin, and he was built entirely around a line of bad wordplay without the play. As someone who grew up loving comic books, including Rob Liefeld ones, it's so haunting that an artist can just die inside and still walk among us.

Brockway: Rob Liefeld had two solid ideas in his life: What if I gave Teen Titans cargo pants, and what if I made Ambush Bug a fucking asshole. His empire is built on guys with anger-wrinkles named Captain United States and Duperman. Every Rob Liefeld creation is the action figure your grandma brings home from the Dollar Store. Even knowing that, Shrink! is a new low in IP theft.

Brockway: Rob, putting aside everything else you’ve done wrong here, a tremendous favor you’ve done nothing to deserve: What is the punchline? Is he jacking off in front of her?

Seanbaby: "YA MAGMA PENIS ROCK HARD, DAME; YER RIGHT IT'S TIME TO LAVA, I'LL MOLTEN SEMEN MY WAY OUT."

Brockway: That’s all it can be, right? I’m going to be generous and assume Rob did not intend to draw a masturbating rock monster committing a sex crime. The best case scenario is that he realized “getting your rocks off” had the word “rocks” in it, and also that The Thing was made of rocks. A connection was almost, but not quite made, because when one of Rob Liefeld’s neurons fires all the other neurons dodge it like The Matrix.

Seanbaby: I hope you're right. Because this The Thing is showing his ejaculating igneous boner like he's confused about the changes his body is going through. Is he a child? A visitor from the chaste Earth's core new to the allures of the surface world? Either way, his therapist must be regretting her choice to wear a belly dancing costume to the office today.

Brockway: Rob, putting aside everything else you’ve done wrong here, a load that gets heavier every time I lift it: What is the implied setup to this punchline? You’re leaving it unspoken, as though we, the audience, would of course know the first part of this classic scenario: A tiny man coming to a psychiatrist to brag about how much ant pussy he gets.

Seanbaby: Before we talk more about the sex life of this tiny man I have two points I want to bring up. First, I want to bring up how wildly Rob Liefeld missed when placing this woman's facial features. Her head is having a civil war. This is a human face on a COVID mask.

Brockway: She’s a custom blow-up doll with no options checked. She has the vacant smile of a lobotomy patient remembering ice cream for the fortieth time. This is right before you fuck your Mrs. Potato Head.

Seanbaby: She looks like a corpse holding your next clue in a murderer's fun house. Her haircut is a soybean thresher accident. This is who a police sketch artist would draw if you told them the suspect was a woman and a melting statue and three different little boys.

Brockway: Jesus.

Seanbaby: My other point is that I wouldn't have put a guy who shrinks in the comic about a shrink called Shrink!. That's a confusing stack of hats next to your hat on a hat.

Brockway: No, you know what Rob, I can’t put aside everything else you’ve done wrong here. Why is she looking at the camera in a comic? How did you manage to draw bad acting? Why does the tiny guy have a little custom-made chair? He would only need that if he can’t return to normal size. So his already Crisco-can shaped penis is smaller than that pencil eraser? I think the ladies would complain about that. And why give him huge elephant balls to further overshadow the chode, if indeed the chode is meant to impress? Why did you do this, Rob, when you could have done anything? When you could have traced Deathstroke again and made eight billion dollars?

WHY

CHOOSE

CHODE??

Seanbaby: Rob Liefeld draws penises like a Pictionary player trying to get you to say manatee.

Brockway: Hey have you seen Flight of the Navigator? No reason.

Anyway, you know what the funniest thing in this panel is? Yes, you’re absolutely right. It’s still the chode. But the second funniest thing is the tiny text on the side panel.

Seanbaby: hahaha

Brockway: That detailed copyright isn’t on any of the other panels. Rob was so proud of this wee chodemonger he warranted an extra special super dibs. If any of you motherfuckers ever thought, for one second, “what if Ant-Man had an unusually short, unusually thick penis?” Rob Liefeld will see you in court.

Seanbaby: I wonder what part of this idea he copyrighted. Is it the concept of a shrinking man, or the idea to disassemble a sandwich and shove it down the front of your pants? I can't wait to learn more about Mr. Inches™ and all the satisfied women he flatly slapped™ with his penetrationless freak nub™.

Brockway: That’s the end of the series. I’m serious. There were five of these, total! We were not scraping the dregs for only the worst examples from the long and storied run of Shrink!

Seanbaby: Fucking what? No.

Brockway: This is 100% of the work. It was five starter puns, one sex crime, and one chode. And this teaser art:

Brockway: Hey, there’s Duperman.

Shrink! is a shocking lack. End of sentence. A lack of premise, a lack of execution, a lack of followthrough. Rob Liefeld’s brain is a void in which effort vanishes from the universe. If you’ve ever suddenly lost inspiration halfway through a project, it’s because Rob Liefeld had an idea.

But I lied to you, earlier, when I said you should have a tiny amount of faith in this world.

Seanbaby: FUCKING WHAT? NO.

Brockway: The money rolled in! And not to Peter David! Rob Liefeld stole his story then sold the movie rights to five panels of bubblegum puns and a wide penis. He not only sold the movie rights, they went at auction. Multiple buyers wanted to spend an ungodly amount of money to reserve rights to this:

Brockway: Mid-six against seven figures likely means half a million against three to five million dollars. That makes this the single most valuable chode on earth, easily beating out the entire career of Ron Jeremy.

Seanbaby: That's nearly $17,000,000 per centimeter of dong, but not measured from the direction you'd expect.

Brockway: It’s funny to watch trade writers try to wrap their heads around the premise-

Brockway: The high concept is two panels of temperature puns. The twist is a miniature penis shaped like a blasted tree stump. This is the most savage burn of Analyze This that will ever be written.

Seanbaby: "Fans of traditional humor may not relate to the idioms listed in seemingly random order by a malfunctioning robot, but artist and creator Rob Liefeld boldly reimagines the penis as a loose sack of seafood leftovers in this highly anticipated sendup of dick bulges."

Brockway: No, I think that’s saying the most. These heroes do not lead complicated lives. They’re legally actionable ripoffs of the Fantastic Four. The flame guy’s problem was “hot,” the ice guy’s problem was “cold,” the big guy’s problem was “big.” The rock monster’s problem was indecent exposure and the little guy’s problem was ratio.

Seanbaby: haha her name was Dr. Jessica Powers this whole time? I know you'll never believe me, but I literally backspaced a joke earlier where I said, "Shrink is kind of a cute name for a superhero psychiatrist. I'm surprised Rob didn't call her some stupid shit like Dr. Jessica Powers."

Brockway: Whenever you delete something for being too dumb the words magically appear in Rob Liefeld’s idea journal.

Brockway: I have to imagine these trade articles are referencing some unseen script treatment, and not Rob’s original work. Picture the poor screenwriters handed five Laffy Taffy wrappers and a chode and somehow coming out the other side with a complex tale of superheroes suffering from PTSD that doesn’t stand for Pretty Thick Short Dick.

Seanbaby: Someone thought they could smear this concept, pun-lovers destroying couches with their sloppy dicksacks and radiation, across 90 minutes? No one has ever dreamed bigger. Someone saw a snowman going, "Phrases with temperature in them, but not coherent ones!" and thought they had something. At best this is a "Did Not Place" entry in a Wizard Magazine caption contest. This is a bland New Yorker cartoon one of the kids would not understand in the Family Circus universe, and curse anyone who can say something meaner than that.

Brockway: It’s always interesting to hear the story of how a film gets made. In this case it’s because Sony forgot they bought the rights twenty years ago and finally remembered them now, when they figured “might as well.” I’m sorry, I’m putting words into Sony’s mouth. When asked how they felt about this exciting new project, what Sony actually said was: