D for Defense #35

The prolific imagination of Rob Liefeld when creating new characters is only comparable to those of great creators like Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko. This is how he was capable of renewing the New Mutants villain rooster with an incredible ease, creating out of nothing a large series of very charismatic villains, so dificult to handle that later authors didn’t have any other option than relegating them to limbo when they saw themselves incapable of reaching Liefeld’s freshness in
development of new and attractive characters.

One of them was Forearm, an original villain also in the little game with his name, as his mutation consists in having four arms.

The boys at Progressive Boink say that Forearm has no depth or interest, but everyone knows that an artist is greater by what he shows between the lines than by what he tells directly. We know that a person with four arms is a freak, a deformed, imagine how harsh his childhood must have been, let’s not even consider his adolescence. This kind of marginalization can only lead to joining a mutant terrorist group. Forearm is just a victim of his circunstances, but Liefeld doesn’t explain in detail something that he knows should be clear for his watchfull followers when he can better serve us by focusing on the action.

Also in Progressive Boink they insist in looking for a logic in Forearm’s anatomy. As if people with for superior limbs were common in medicine or biology books. Liefeld represents the deformity in all
it’s rawness, transmitting the horror of living trapped in that body so far away from usual beauty cannons. Luckily nowadays Marvel writers have felt pity for Forearm and he has lost his mutation after M Day, giving him the oportunity of living a normal life at last.

(Be here next week for this:.

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