Broken Frontier

If you were trying to forget just how infinitely crappy mainstream comic books were in the nineties, too damn bad…

Shoulder pads, rectangular guns, and receding hairlines are all the rage again – at least in the stagnant imaginary world of Rob Liefeld’s The Infinite. Published by Image, under writer Robert Kirkman’s new Skybound imprint, I’m left puzzled as to how the same company that produced Witch Doctor could crank out such boring, inappropriately over-the-top drivel. The quality gap between the two books is awesome – in the truest, scariest, most disturbing sense of the word.

It was this sort of bombastic, self-congratulatory garbage that almost drove me away from comics in the nineties. Thank God for Vertigo…

I mean, talk about a vanity project. Perhaps we should be thankful, though. Without The Infinite we might not have realized just how far up his own ass Liefeld’s head is. This book is that bad. Even Kirkman, despite a valiant effort to imbue the story with some heart and craft, can’t/won’t save The Infinite from a quick transition to the quarter bin.

I could go on at length about the retread, Cable-esque time travel story or how Liefeld’s visual storytelling is so technically flawed, it literally defies logic but that would feel like too much of a validation of the work. This is a guy who doesn’t seem to respect the medium. If he did, he would be able to draw feet by now and foreshortening wouldn’t be such an exercise in grotesquerie.

Perhaps the worst comic I’ve read in years, here’s hoping The Infinite's shelf life is far more finite than six issues.