It is impossible to deny that the enduringly popular comic book creator and Image Comics co-founder Rob Liefeld is a passionate man, especially when it comes to the subject of his chosen field. Liefeld's fervor for the medium and its surrounding industry manifests in many forms, most obviously in the name of his own publishing enterprises, Extreme Studios and Awesome Comics, and most recently as an endlessly provocative Twitter feed. Whether hyping his books like DC's The Savage Hawkman ("Of all the DC books I'm working on, I'd recommend Hawkman above all"), evangelizing the work of his peers on the revivals of Extreme-owned properties like Prophet ("It is brilliant"), excoriating comics journalists ("You are a complete douche bag"), or taunting the timidity of Hollywood ("Find your balls"), Rob Liefeld is always excited.

Being an excited person, Rob Liefeld has been known to employ a preponderance of exclamation points. Little did the cartoonist know that this activity was being catalogued by Ben Tripp at Excitable Liefeld, a website that offers charts, graphs and real-time tracking of Rob Liefeld's use of exclamation points on Twitter.

Because the Twitter API is frustratingly limited (ever try to retrieve your really old tweets? You can't), Excitable Liefeld has only been able to analyze just over 10,000 Liefeld tweets. Nevertheless, the results jibe scientifically with Liefeld's hyperactive idiom. More than 42% of the cartoonist's tweets contain exclamation points -- many times, more than once. Indeed, it appears Liefeld has transmitted as many as 1,200 tweets that contain at least two exclamation points, and even one tweet that contained as many as 27.


The graph above indicates that Liefeld is most likely to tweet excitably on Thursdays. No conclusion is offered, but we suspect this activity is caused by virtue of the fact that new comic books go on sale every Wednesday. Being a busy man, Liefeld probably doesn't read new books until Thursdays, which would account for those particularly galvanized tweets.

Most impressively, Excitable Liefeld offers an interactive chart that tracks Liefeld's use of exclamation points down to the minute. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with all the material over the weekend, as we may wish to set an exam this term.

[Via Ben Scofield]