Rob Liefeld Goes Directly To The Fans With Extreme New Project, Last Blood

Rob Liefeld, the Image Comics co-founder best known for creating characters like Deadpool and Cable, has a new, creator-owned title available for sale at Whatnot. Titled Last Blood, Liefeld’s mysterious new book has been selling at sky-high prices in the early going, particularly because he has a number of exclusive variant covers, some of which are only available to the earliest adopters on Whatnot. The superstar artist has kept the comic almost completely out of sight, forcing fans to decide if they’re going to buy in based almost entirely on Lifeld’s name and reputation. 

The comic sold out almost immediately, and by this morning, Liefeld is promising that it’s headed back to print again. In its second printing, the “clean” and “bloody” covers from the first go-’round will come back, and so will the sketch cover — althoguh this time, it will be a more traditional white one, rather than the black that sold out last night.

“When you sit and you draw a comic book for yourself, you’re asking yourself every page, ‘Will anyone give a shit?’ And then I have had people say, ‘If you don’t show it to me, I’m not buying it.’ Okay, but I’m not showing it to you,” Liefeld told ComicBook.com, suggesting that he was stunned by how well Last Blood performed.

Liefeld said that the idea of doing a creator-owned book — after several years of working with Marvel, DC, and other corporate publishers with great success — was in part driven by something as simple as wanting to make something he could connect with his audience over.

“The truth of the matter is, I just wanted to tell a story,” Liefeld explained. “I wanted to tell a story that I could just do whatever I wanted. It didn’t even feel like Image Comics. Image Comics had a system that we fed. I’m just drawing these pages with some familiar characters, some new characters, and the story is starting to take on a life of its own and it’s talking to me. I was really going to make it only 23 pages, and then I made it 28 pages because when you’re printing to order, a 24 page signature is way more affordable than a 32 page signature. But I went, no, I’m going bigger. I’m going bigger because I’m going to keep telling this story. Then you send it to the printer and you go, ‘Is anyone going to want even buy this?’”

Liefeld describes Last Blood, which he says he is planning as a four-issue miniseries, as “my little side project. It’s designed with his hardcore fans in mind, beucase “I understand the base of people who enjoy my work.”

You can get a first look at the new sketch cover variant below.

It’s not hard to notice that, while the sketch cover is a little different, the font for the first issue’s main cover bears at least a passing resemblance to Bloodstrike. With the mention of familiar characters and the word “Blood” in the title, don’t be too surprised if we get some crossover there. Then again, that might be overthinking things. As Liefeld himself acknowledges, he’s…got a theme going.

“I have Bloodstrike, I have Bloodwulf, but also I was very successful telling stories with Youngblood, Team Youngblood, Youngblood: Strikefile, the Bloodpool,” Liefeld said with a laugh. “I’m like, did y’all forget — Nobody has more blood than their books than me. Literally, right?”

While it might seem like a bit of a liability to go into a new project like this totally blind, Liefeld says he felt a little bit like he was going home again.

“When I talk with my old heads about comics, we talk about how much is given away now,” Liefeld told ComicBook.com. “Whether it’s movies or whether it’s comics, the publishers want to entice you to sell as many copies as possible, so they are showing you more than maybe you want. When I grew up reading comics, you just knew a comic was coming in 30 days. That’s it. There was no advance art. You didn’t get a five page preview. Nothing. I have had people tell me, ‘I love that you’re not showing us anything. I love that I am going in blind.’”

“I really cannot emphasize enough the power of surprise,” Liefeld added. “I know that if I was sitting next to you, any of the hundreds of people who bought their copies last night on our opening night…I know that on page seven, they’re going to be like, ‘What?’ Even my own family was like, ‘That last page, that last page works.’”

The direct-to-consumer element is unique within Liefeld’s long career — and he has already been approached by publishers interested in taking it out of the crowdfunding model and into the direct market.

“I’ve been doing this a long time and I am still touched….I had two publishers reach out and ask me if they could publish Last Blood in the last 24 hours — ‘Hey Rob, we would like to know if there’s a publishing partnership that we could forge with this,’” Liefeld told ComciBook.com. “For right now, this is the way. I can see doing a trade paperback at some point, but on my whatnot, if I do a remarque or a certain sketch and people really find favor with that, I won’t revisit it. It’s one of one. It needs to stay one of one. These books, I think being direct to consumer is part of the fun.”

Still, Liefeld says, he is putting together a retail program — one that allows comic book stores to get in on the fun, but also keeps the bespoke aspect of Last Blood in place.

“If you’re a retailer and you want to buy your own version of this book, we can have that discussion,” Liefeld said. “We can make that happen. It’ll come with the custom cover and a certain print run, but I’m making it reasonable. Sure, it would be fun to distribute more of these through comic stores, because they’re the backbone of the industry. So of course, that will be open if people want to take that jump with me.”

You can follow Liefeld on Whatnot to find the details on future print runs of Last Blood #1, and future issues of the series.