Posted in: Comics, Image, Marvel Comics, X-Men | Tagged: cable, eric stephenson, fabian nicieza, louise simonson, rob liefeld, SpinnerRack, x-force
So Who Wrote Rob Liefeld’s Columns For SpinnerRack In 2001 Then?
So who wrote Rob Liefeld’s Robservations column about Cable for SpinnerRack in 2001? And did someone fake the YouTube video?
SpinnerRack.com was a comic book news, views, and reviews website that ran from 2001 to 2002 and was lost to time. It was set up by Eric Stephenson, a former employee of Rob Liefeld, who would become Director of Sales & Marketing of Image Comics in 2002, and later Publisher of Image Comics. The site featured a number of columns called Robservations, purporting to be written by Liefeld. Indeed, Liefeld says he wrote the column for the site on his own website in 2011, when he wrote: “I had been writing an online column called ‘Robservations‘ for the website Spinnerrack.com.” It also hosted Liefeld’s webcartoon Shrink. And Entertainment Weekly reported in 2002 that “Columbia is developing ‘Shrink!’ as a vehicle for Jennifer Lopez to produce and star in, playing a superheroine-turned-therapist for folks like her who still fight crime in their underwear. The project is based on the Internet comic strip by Marvel Comics vet Rob Liefeld, which runs at SpinnerRack.com.” Rob now denies having written the Robservations XI: The Secret Origin of Cable installment of the Robservations column.
Why am I talking about SpinnerRack.com and Rob Liefeld’s columns now? Well, earlier this week, I reported on former X-Books writers Louise Simonson andFabian Nicieza‘s recollection of the creation of Cable and the decision to make him retroactively the son of Scott Summers, with Nicieza crediting it to other former X-Men writer/artists Jim Lee, Whilce Portacio,and X-Men editor Bob Harras. In response, Rob Liefeld claimed these were “delusional lies from delusional minds”, that “I can confirm that this is 100% horse sh-t. Jim had nothing to do with CABLE whatsoever. Never heard this one before”, and how he was putting allusions to Cable being Nathan Summers inX-Force #1 first.
However, I found a previous Robservations column credited to him for the SpinnerRack website, captured by the Wayback Machine from 2001, where Rob specifically states, “imagine my surprise when I received a call from Bob Harras, informing me that he, Jim Lee and Whilce Portacio had crafted a story that would reveal that Cable was the son of Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor. I politely protested and asked Bob repeatedly to reconsider what I felt was a decision that would be damaging to the character in the long run”. And a YouTube video from 2011 where he says, “Cable was always supposed to be Sam Guthrie from the future to come back and train himself to lead the war that’s coming. And Bob Harras called me one day and said, ‘Oh, he’s Scott and Jean’s kid… It’s done, it’s actually in Jim’s issue; we established it.”
Rob Liefeld has pushed back further. On Facebook, he posted, “These articles being shared are false. I did not write those. This is like AI or something.” And, quoting the Bleeding Cool article, he added, “This is FAKE news. The article is manufactured. The site was scrubbed 24 years ago. No remnant other than false, manufactured crap. Let me add, I did not write the phony article.” And again on X, “Again, now we are living in a time of fake columns that I never wrote being shared as if I authored them. I did not write the fake column. Listen to my podcast for truth in all things comic books. “
Well, let’s look into this. Firstly, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is not fake news or A.I. While it is possible to get pages deleted from the archive, they can’t be amended or replaced. But were they faked to begin with? On X, Rob posted “Archived. Yeah. Where’s it from? Not me.” Well, back in 2001, former Bleeding Cool reviewer Hannibal Tabu reported, “This just in …The former makers of NextPlanetOver.com (not the soulless execs, but the actual comics fans who did the work every day) including Eric Stephenson… are back in the game at Spinnerrack.com, which is looking at a June 5th launch date… not intended as a “business” like NPO was. It’s intended as a chorus of voices from within and without who will serve as an online magazine and hangout. Hang on, lemme get my notes here … “online magazine and message boards, putting a new spin on comics, doing it to encourage people to read comics.” Eric Stephenson likens it to a publication called Amazing Heroes, which I had never heard of.”
Very funny, Hannibal. In 2002, on All The Rage for Silver Bullet Comic Books, I wrote about Shrink on SpinnerRack, saying, “Shrink From The Masses: The recently announced Hollywood purchase of the Shrink concept from Rob Liefeld, starring Jennifer Lopez as a psychiatrist for superheroes, caused quite a bit of mainstream media hype through news services and the Howard Stern show. When the Hollywood Reporter printed URL to Spinnerrack who have hosted the Shrink trip, hits went ballistic and the site crashed. They’re not too happy…”
You can still find lots of references to SpinnerRack and Rob Liefeld’s column on it inthe Usenet newsgroups, captured for all time by Google when they bought DejaNews, including for its launch; “Just to let you know, SpinnerRack.com has been updated with reviews of some of this week’s new releases. Yesterday, we published a guest column written by the always controversial Rob Liefeld — you gotta love him, or you gotta hate him.” And there are Usenet comments specifically on the Cable column credited to Rob Liefeld, that he says is fake or A.I, withScott McAllister replied to that column in 2001, saying, “If Rob’s tale is accurate, Bob Harras came up with an origin for Cable by consulting creators of _other_ books? Would Jim and Whilce actually do that, or is that a nice way to say that Harras took it mostly upon himself to create the backstory? I hope that’s not common practice at Marvel.”
In the 1990s, Eric Stephenson worked as an editor and later editor-in-chief for Rob Liefeld’s Extreme Studios imprint at Image. He wrote on titles including Bloodstrike, Brigade, New Men, Supreme, Team Youngblood, and Youngblood, as well as editing for Liefeld’s other publishers, Maximum Press and Awesome. He returned to Image as Director of Sales & Marketing, later becoming Publisher. He was also my editor around 1999 on The Gutter Press column for NextPlanetOver, and set up SpinnerRack after NPO collapsed. On X, Rob Liefeld replied to a user who also found mention of the SpinnerRack Robservations columns on Rob’s site, saying, “Hey Bot Boy – of course I write columns – just not that one! Not hard to comprehend a fake installment.”
On hispodcast yesterday, Rob Liefeld doubled down, framing the whole situation as a way for people to downplay his involvement in creating Cable. On the record, I would absolutely affirm that Rob Liefeld is definitely the creator of Cable, and no one should be able to take that away from him, whether he planned for Cable to be the older version of Nathan Summers or Sam Guthrie or not. Rob Liefeld, however, sees a danger. He says,
“If there are people who continue to make claims, if they didn’t know who Cable was, how could they have any claim to the character whatsoever? It becomes comical at some point, and that is what I suggest: we laugh it off. But there are manipulations and editing. I’m reading articles I did not write as if I wrote them, and they’re being passed off to you to bolster an argument that is meant to cut my knees off in regards to the creations that I put forth. All I can do is tell you that’s not me. I didn’t write that; that’s probably with today’s technology, AI. It’s pervasive. I think it’s gonna get worse before it gets better; it’s gonna hit people more. It’s gonna hit a larger swathe of people and personalities than me. All I can do is continue to double down. That book was created by me in March/April 1981, that is when I came up with the story, in the middle of the book, Cable is using telekinesis and Domino, as I’ve shared these pages last week, tells him “what are you gonna do, you’ll reveal yourself?” This is the Nathan Summers of all. This is the reveal. Before I draw it I think it, as I think it, I share it with my editor, it is reflected in other titles. As time marches on, people will continue to contest, they will try and twist, they will try and alter, they will create false documents to somehow further twisted notions, they will say things that are crazy. We had this couple years ago and when Roy Thomas asserted “I created Wolverine” which was a shock to everybody but all the people who could stand up and him were dead and that was something that was argued over and over again. The fairness of the fact that anyone who could dispute him was no longer alive to do so. Well, I’m here, I’m alive, continue to just double down again on history and on the timelines.”
Indeed, Roy Thomas, as editor of Hulk, claiming and securing co-creator credit for Wolverine and many other titles he edited and characters, to the chagrin of the estates of the creators who had previously been credited and slightly compensated for that creation, still echoes throughout the industry, and puts this discussion in a new light. It is impossible for anyone to have retroactively faked or used A.I. to create columns archived in 2001 or videos in 2011. So it leaves me with three questions I would love Rob, or anyone, to answer.
- As Rob previously said, he doesn’t say that the Robservations column and Spinner Rack website weren’t archived in 2001, just that he didn’t write that particular column. So who did? And did they write any of Rob’s other columns back then?
- Why did Rob not object to what was written about Jim Lee, Bob Harras, Whilce Portacio, Nathan Summers and Cable under his name at the time, even as people were discussing it online at the time?
- Why did Rob, on a panel with Jeph Loeb, recorded on YouTube in 2011, say those things about his editor Bob Harras calling him up about Jim Lee, Nathan Summers and Cable, and him accepting it?
But Rob also talks about his daughter moving to New York for college, how he has dropped her off, and everything he’s going through, and how that’s what is really important. Rob, I am going through the exact same thing myself and will soon be dropping off my daughter in Leeds for the same thing. And yes, that’s what is really important. But I would still like to know what’s going on here as well.
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