Why would anyone imitate Liefeld? Copying a guy who mainly copies other comic artists is a recipe to not have a career in comics.

I started buying in the mid-90's so the "90's look" was all I knew until I discovered back issues, other than the older comics polybagged together at the drug stores. I've never really got the criticism of the 90's outside of actual depictions of bad anatomy, which yes Liefeld did at the height of his career. But I remember reading a short story of his in a Warlord issue at the end of the book. And until I read the credits I would have never know it was him, as it was nothing like his 90s style that got him work. I think he does have some talent but like anyone at the height of their popularity forced to shell out more and more content at less and less time to do so you are going to get lackadaisical work.

Also Deadpool is ruined now. He actually use to be a good character. Now he is just .... ugh. Made it through 10 minutes of the first movie and walked away. He's also annoyingly obnoxious in Ultimate Spiderman animated series, a show I otherwise liked.

At DC, he was mentored, as had Larsen and McFarlane (and Silvestri).  McFarlane, in one of those video pieces that Stan Lee did, in the 90s, credited Dick Giordano with working with him on his techniques and storytelling.  However, his natural inclination seems to be more about design than storytelling.  He designs amazing looking pages, but, they don't necessarily advance the story.  Liefeld's work, at DC was cleaner and more anatomically correct, with some of that coming from inkers and editors demanding corrections.  Hawk & Dove hinted at what was to come, though Karl Kesel kept Rob from his worst inclinations.  At Marvel, I kind of get the impression they were left to exaggerate more and more, especially after sales proved high.  At Image, no one was reining in their worst excesses; so, it became such a big factor.

The 90s, in general, gets pared down to the Image stuff; because they made so much noise and the speculators snapped up every book and they fed that.  Wizard cheered them on, since they were all about speculating.  They jumped on Valiant's bandwagon when prices started to take off, because of Unity stirring interest in the earlier issues.  You had a lot of indie work going on and some great books; Dark Horse had a wide variety of great titles.  However, the Speculator Boom was such a big thing, while it was happening and it coincided with the Image guys breaking off (and probably influenced their decision) that it overwhelms everything else.  DC and Marvel were feeding speculators and then here is an upstart company from some "young punk" Marvel guys who are shoveling it into their hands.  It becomes easy to forget stuff like Dan Clowes, or Bone, or Waid's Flash or Starman.  Having been reading comics since the dawn of the 70s, I found the 90s mainstream to be rather sparse, for how my tastes had matured, with things like Flash and Starman feeding the superhero jones and the indies feeding the desire for more complex stories and adventure fiction without flashy, gratuitous violence.  My pull list got pretty eclectic, in the 90s.  However, I read all kinds of material, even in the 70s.  My collection had Archie and Harvey, as well as DC, Marvel, Charlton and Gold Key.  I had westerns and war comics, as well as superhero, with a smidgen of horror (not my genre).  So, I always looked for good sci-fi and fantasy tales, espionage and super-spy adventures, military stories, westerns and the like and you could find that in the indies, in the 90s, but with more sophisticated writing (in some cases).  90s James Bond comics were giving me what 90s James Bond films were not.

I think Rob developed a style that was fast enough and worked well enough, for him, but which tended towards pin-ups, which is probably why he depended so much on stock panels and resorted to swiping when he deviated from that, as he fell outside his comfort zone.  He didn't have an editor making him rework things or pairing him with people who could make up for his deficiencies.  He also let himself get overwhelmed with too many books and overseeing other books and I think less and less work went into his books.  I also think he, like McFarlane, had learned that original art that had poster/pin-up shots could sell for better prices and worked more of that into their layouts.  

Youngblood had some potential to be done in a tongue in cheek way (think the Giffen era Justice League books) due to the premise of them licensing their image out, but instead it just played the premise straight and looked like a generic superhero comic (at least the Liefld-era issues did). The only "fun" character was Badrock IMO.

As much as I enjoyed the Alan Moore Supreme run, the original 20 issues of the first Run was pretty solid. He was the first “Superman” anagram that had him as a jerk with an ongoing solo book.

I was listening to a liveplay D&D stream run by Matt Colville from 2016 and he was describing someone the party met, and he essentially said-"he looks like a flesh golem sort of, you know like Frankenstein out of proportion, like he was put together by someone who obviously had no sense of human proportion, you know, like he was drawn by Rob Liefeld! Like someone tried to draw a human having never seen one before." It was a perfect deadpan delivery. I couldn't stop laughing.

-M

This cracks me up.