I'm not surprised! That's when a lot of people in our generation got into it, especially for the X-Men in particular, and so many of the classic stories and characters and artists are from then.
But it's not even just the Liefeld badness (And the Miller/Lee-esqe stylization that Liefeld was the worst expy of, that became a huge trend starting in the late 80s) it's just something about how pages were put together? I actually first noticed it was something beyond that when a friend loaned me a bunch of the classic Wolfman & Perez New Teen Titans; I don't think anyone uses that as an example of bad art, but my brain just couldn't parse it at all.
I think it's partly that I need pages, idk, to have a sort of solid sense of form and line and negative/positive space? And that period was when things were shifting from the all-manual four-color printing to more modern technologies and methods, which offered a whole much of new possibilities, but a lot of the possibilities they tried first involved going for color! and dynamism! instead of shape and line and depth, and it makes my eyes just sort of skitter everywhere.
I was the right age at that period, and I wanted to be a comics fan, but I was reading Elfquest and shonen and newspaper comic compilations and Archies and wormeaten silver age stuff from my grandparents' basement because the mainline superheroes of the time made my brain hurt.
(I have a related problem, I think, with original-sailor-moon era classic shoujo manga. It's all froth and gradients and my eyes can't figure out what to look at.)
no subject
But it's not even just the Liefeld badness (And the Miller/Lee-esqe stylization that Liefeld was the worst expy of, that became a huge trend starting in the late 80s) it's just something about how pages were put together? I actually first noticed it was something beyond that when a friend loaned me a bunch of the classic Wolfman & Perez New Teen Titans; I don't think anyone uses that as an example of bad art, but my brain just couldn't parse it at all.
I think it's partly that I need pages, idk, to have a sort of solid sense of form and line and negative/positive space? And that period was when things were shifting from the all-manual four-color printing to more modern technologies and methods, which offered a whole much of new possibilities, but a lot of the possibilities they tried first involved going for color! and dynamism! instead of shape and line and depth, and it makes my eyes just sort of skitter everywhere.
I was the right age at that period, and I wanted to be a comics fan, but I was reading Elfquest and shonen and newspaper comic compilations and Archies and wormeaten silver age stuff from my grandparents' basement because the mainline superheroes of the time made my brain hurt.
(I have a related problem, I think, with original-sailor-moon era classic shoujo manga. It's all froth and gradients and my eyes can't figure out what to look at.)