Jim Lee
Jim Lee is a Korean-born American comic book artist, writer, editor, and publisher. As of 2023, he is the President, Publisher, and Chief Creative Officer of DC Comics. In recognition of his work, Lee has received a Harvey Award, Inkpot Award and three Wizard Fan Awards.
Lee got his start in the industry in 1987 as an artist for Marvel Comics, illustrating titles such as Alpha Flight and The Punisher War Journal before becoming widely popular through his work on The Uncanny X-Men. On that book, Lee worked with writer Chris Claremont, with whom he co-created the character Gambit. That led to a 1991 spinoff series on which Lee and Claremont were the initial creative team. The debut issue, X-Men #1, which Lee penciled and co-wrote with Claremont, became the best-selling comic book of all time, according to Guinness World Records. Lee's style was later used for the designs of the X-Men: The Animated Series.
In 1992, Lee and several other artists founded the publishing company, Image Comics, to publish their creator-owned comics. Lee published titles such as WildC.A.T.s and Gen13 through his studio, WildStorm Productions. In 1998, wanting to spend less time as a publisher and more time illustrating, Lee sold WildStorm to DC Comics, and ran WildStorm as a DC imprint until 2010. During this period, he also illustrated successful titles set in DC's main fictional universe, such as the year-long storylines "Batman: Hush" and "Superman: For Tomorrow"), books, and the New 52 run of Justice League. On February 18, 2010, it was announced that DC Comics had appointed Lee and Dan DiDio as its co-publishers. In June 2018, Lee was also appointed the company's chief creative officer, replacing Geoff Johns. In February 2020, when DiDio left the company, Lee became its sole publisher.
Aside from illustrating comics, he has done work as a designer or creative director on other DC products, such as action figures, video games, branded automobiles and backpacks. Outside the comics industry, Lee has designed album covers, as well as the packaging of one of General Mills' monster-themed cereal boxes for its 2014 Halloween collection. His private commission sketches command high prices ranging up to thousands of dollars.
Early life
Jim Lee was born on August 11, 1964, in Seoul, South Korea. In a December 2023 interview, he describes his nostalgic memories of life in that country, where he first began drawing at a young age, using oil pastels with an art teacher who visited his home, and developing a love of Max Fleischer's 1940s animated Superman series. His strongest memory of living in Seoul, however, was when, at the age of 4 or 5, he was hit by a small truck while crossing the street, later regaining consciousness in the hospital in the presence of his father, a doctor. Lee says that the incident increased his parents' sense of protectiveness as he grew older, and summarizes his early years by saying, "Comics. Trauma. Art. That was the be-all, end-all of my childhood."In the aftermath of the Korean War, Lee's parents desired a better, safer life for their family, and moved to the United States when Lee was in elementary school. They lived in Warren, Ohio, and Youngstown, Ohio, before settling in St. Louis, Missouri, where Lee lived a "typical middle-class childhood". Lee attended River Bend Elementary School in Chesterfield and later St. Louis Country Day School, where he drew posters for school plays. Having had to learn English when he first came to the U.S. instilled in Lee with the sense of being an outsider, as did the "preppy, upper-class" atmosphere of Country Day. As a result, on the rare occasions that his parents bought him comics, Lee's favorite characters were the X-Men, because they were outsiders themselves. Lee says that he benefited as an artist by connecting with characters that were themselves disenfranchised, like Spider-Man, or who were born of such backgrounds, such as Superman, who was created by two Jewish men from Cleveland to lift their spirits during the Depression. Lee also connected with Superman because like Lee, Superman was "the ultimate immigrant", which helped him assimilate into American culture, and provided him a sense of "sanctuary" from the pressures he felt as an immigrant who did not fit in, and the shame he felt as a Korean. For this reason, Superman's practice of wearing eyeglasses in order to effect a disguise was something Lee sympathized with, as he felt that he exhibited an "American side" at school, and then his "Korean side" at home. He developed a desire to one day work in comics between the ages of nine and twelve. Though given a Korean name at birth, he chose the name Jim when he became a naturalized U.S. citizen at age 12.
Lee attended Princeton University. During his junior year in 1984, Lee drew editorial cartoons for the school newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. Lee's classmates predicted in his senior yearbook that he would found his own comic book company. Lee, however, was resigned to following his father's career in medicine, continuing at Princeton by studying psychology, with the intention of becoming a medical doctor. This was largely influenced by the strict expectations of his parents, whom Lee said were "really aggressive in terms of how they wanted me to find true success," owing to views about security and fear of failure that Lee describes as being typical in Korean households.
In 1986, as he was preparing to graduate, Lee took an art class that reignited his love of drawing, and led to his rediscovery of comics at a time when works such as Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen spurred a renaissance within the American comics industry. After obtaining his psychology degree, Lee, having grown to view a career in medicine to a long escalator ride that he did not wish to make, decided to postpone applying to medical school for one year, in order to give himself time to break into comics. When he laid out this plan to his parents, it led to a heated argument that prompted Lee to flee his house. His father pursued him and reconciled with him, expressing understanding of his commitment to his dreams. Lee says that this influenced him to refrain from ever placing the same level of pressure on his own children. Earning the reluctant blessing of his parents, Lee vowed that he would attend medical school if he did not break into the comic book industry in the gap year he allotted for himself. He set up a small drafting table next to his bed, and would spend 8 to 10 hours each day drawing, to the point that he suffered from sore knuckles and a pinched nerve that required his father to give him a shoulder brace.
Comics career
Rise to fame at Marvel Comics
The samples that Lee initially submitted to various publishers did not find success. When he befriended St. Louis-area comics artists Don Secrease and Rick Burchett, they convinced him he needed to show his portfolio to editors in person, prompting Lee to attend a New York comics convention, where he met editor Archie Goodwin. Goodwin invited Lee to Marvel Comics, where the aspiring artist received his first assignment by editor Carl Potts, who hired him to pencil the mid-list series Alpha Flight, seguéing from that title in 1989 to Punisher: War Journal. Lee's work on the Punisher: War Journal was inspired by artists such as Frank Miller, David Ross, Kevin Nowlan, and Whilce Portacio, as well as Japanese manga.In 1989, Lee filled in for regular illustrator Marc Silvestri on Uncanny X-Men #248 and did another guest stint on issues 256 through 258 as part of the "Acts of Vengeance" storyline, eventually becoming the series' ongoing artist with issue #268, following Silvestri's departure. During his stint on Uncanny, Lee first worked with inker Scott Williams, who would become a long-time collaborator. During his run on the title, Lee co-created the character Gambit with long-time X-Men writer Chris Claremont.
Lee's artwork quickly gained popularity in the eyes of enthusiastic fans, which allowed him to gain greater creative control of the franchise. In 1991, Lee helped launch a second X-Men series simply called X-Men vol. 2, as both the artist and as co-writer with Claremont. X-Men vol. 2 #1 is still the best-selling comic book of all-time with sales of over 8.1 million copies and nearly $7 million, according to a public proclamation by Guinness World Records at the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con. The sales figures were generated in part by publishing the issue with five different variant covers, four of which show different characters from the book that formed a single image when laid side by side, and a fifth, gatefold cover of that combined image, large numbers of which were purchased by retailers who anticipated fans and speculators who would buy multiple copies in order to acquire a complete collection of the covers. Lee designed new character uniforms for the series, including those worn by Cyclops, Jean Grey, Rogue, Betsy Braddock and Storm. He also created the villain Omega Red. Lee's style of rendering the X-Men was later used for the designs the television program X-Men: The Animated Series. Actor/comedian Taran Killam, who ventured into comics writing with The Illegitimates, has cited X-Men #1 as the book that inspired his interest in comics.
Stan Lee interviewed Lee in the documentary series The Comic Book Greats.
Image Comics and WildStorm, return to Marvel
Enticed by the idea of being able to exert more control over his own work, in 1992, Lee accepted the invitation to join six other artists who broke away from Marvel to form Image Comics, which would publish their creator-owned titles. Lee's group of titles was initially called Aegis Entertainment before being christened WildStorm Productions, and published Lee's initial title WildC.A.T.s, which Lee pencilled and co-wrote, and other series created by Lee in the same shared universe. The other major series of the initial years of Wildstorm, for which Lee either created characters, co-plotted or provided art for, included Stormwatch, Deathblow and Gen13.In 1993, Lee and his friend, Valiant Comics publisher Steven Massarsky, arranged a Valiant/Image Comics crossover miniseries called Deathmate, in which the Valiant characters would interact with those of WildStorm, and of Lee's fellow Image partner, Rob Liefeld. The miniseries would consist of four "center books", two each produced by the respective companies, plus a prologue and epilogue book. Wildstorm produced Deathmate Black, with Lee himself contributing to the writing. He illustrated the covers for that book, the Deathmate Tourbook and the prologue book, as well as contributing to the prologue's interior inks.
WildStorm would expand its line to include other ongoing titles whose creative work was handled by other writers and artists, some of which were spinoffs of the earlier titles, or properties owned by other creators, such as Whilce Portacio's Wetworks. As publisher, Lee later expanded his comics line creating two publishing imprints of WildStorm, Homage and Cliffhanger, to publish creator-owned comics by some selected creators of the US comics industry.
Lee and Rob Liefeld, another Marvel-illustrator-turned-Image-founder, returned to Marvel in 1996 to participate in a reboot of several classic characters; the project was known as Heroes Reborn. While Liefeld reworked Captain America and The Avengers, Lee plotted Iron Man and plotted and illustrated Fantastic Four issues #1–6. Halfway through the project, Lee's studio took over Liefeld's two titles, finishing all four series. According to Lee, Marvel proposed continuing the Heroes Reborn lineup indefinitely, but under the condition that Lee would draw at least one of them himself, which he refused to do. Instead, he accepted an offer to re-imagine and relaunch three mainstream Marvel Universe titles: Defenders, Doctor Strange, and Nick Fury. Though scheduled to debut in December 1997, these three relaunches never appeared.
Lee returned to WildStorm, where he would publish series such as The Authority and Planetary, as well as Alan Moore's imprint, America's Best Comics. Lee himself wrote and illustrated a 12-issue series called Divine Right: The Adventures of Max Faraday, in which an internet slacker inadvertently manages to download the secrets of the universe, and is thrown into a wild fantasy world.