Rob Liefeld Defends Man of Steel, Ninja Turtles Directors

If there's one thing that can be counted upon when you're writing about entertainment on the Internet, it's that for every popular figure in modern entertainment, there are a handful of very vocal detractors, some of whom seem hell-bent on commenting on every event or article related to the object of their animosity. Zack Snyder, the super-stylized director of films like 300 and Watchmen, is certainly one such director. Of the films he's known for, three of the four (the aforementioned comic book adaptations and a remake of George A. Romero's classic Dawn of the Dead) are updates of other people's properties, meaning the films come with their own fan bases, their own expectations and, in the case of something like Watchmen, its own baggage (only Sucker Punch is his own original property). The fact that his next film is the hugely-anticipated Superman reboot Man of Steel is only serving to entrench his supporters and detractors into their positions for and against. One supporter--or at least somebody who's sick of hearing about the detractors--is Rob Liefeld, himself not unfamiliar with some pretty scathing critiques from fans and critics alike. "Seriously, haters of Snyder, Bay, etc.....the act is so old. Get over yourselves," tweeted Liefeld on Tuesday evening, as the Man of Steel trailer was the dominant subject of conversation on Twitter. It was one of a handful of tweets he made that night expressing boredom with another round of Snyder-bashing, but the inclusion of Bay was an interesting note. First of all, there was the imagined war of words between Bay and Guillermo del Toro, whose Pacific Rim is being set up as a franchise at Warner/Legendary and will presumably be in competition with Bay's  Transformers for the "big fighting robots" championship title. Those reports were hot and heavy at the time, so the unprovoked Bay name-drop may have been in response to the torrent of negative sentiment leveled at the Armageddon director as a result of that exchange. Secondly, and we're certainly not the first to point this out, Liefeld could be considered the Michael Bay of comics. His bombastic, over-the-top style and crowd-pleasing approach to the medium have made him a superstar, wealthy and famous beyond what most in the field could hope to accomplish--but the style tends to drive away purists, critics and the crowd who insist on taking their art "seriously."