Jim Lee

Biography

In the spring of 1986, as he was preparing to graduate from Princeton University, Jim Lee signed up for a drawing class. By then a medical career seemed to him like a long escalator he did not want to step onto. He told his parents that he would put off medical school for a year and try to break into comics.

He was born on 11 August 1964 in Seoul. His father was a doctor. He began drawing while still in Korea: a teacher came to the house, and they worked in oil pastels. When Lee was in elementary school the family moved to the United States, lived for a time in Warren and Youngstown, Ohio, and settled in St. Louis. He had to learn English from scratch, he felt like an outsider at the private St. Louis Country Day School, and his favourite characters became the X-Men, who were outsiders too. He also loved Superman, “the ultimate immigrant”. He was given a Korean name at birth and chose the name Jim at twelve, when he became a naturalized American citizen.

At Princeton, in his junior year, 1984, he drew editorial cartoons for the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian. His classmates wrote in the senior yearbook that he would one day found his own comics company. Lee himself, at his parents’ insistence, was heading for a medical degree.

He used the year in full: he set up a small drafting table beside his bed and drew eight to ten hours a day, until his hand hurt. Publishers turned down his first samples. Two St. Louis artists, Don Secrease and Rick Burchett, convinced him to show his work in person. At a comics convention in New York Lee met the editor Archie Goodwin, who brought him to Marvel Comics, and the editor Carl Potts gave him the series Alpha Flight. In 1989 Lee moved to The Punisher: War Journal, where for the first time he inked his own pencils. Among those whose influence he acknowledged were Frank Miller and Japanese manga.

In 1989 he filled in for Marc Silvestri on The Uncanny X-Men (issue 248), and from issue 268 he became the regular artist. There he began working with the inker Scott Williams and, with the writer Chris Claremont, created the character Gambit. In 1991, for the new series X-Men, Lee was both artist and co-writer, and the first issue sold more than 8.1 million copies: according to Guinness World Records, it is the best-selling comic book of all time. Sales were helped by five variant covers, four of which fitted together into a single image. Lee designed new costumes for Cyclops, Jean Grey, Rogue and Storm, created the villain Omega Red, and his style became the basis for the cartoon X-Men: The Animated Series.

In 1992, together with six other artists, he left Marvel and founded Image Comics, which published their creator-owned series. Lee’s studio was named WildStorm Productions and put out WildC.A.T.s, Stormwatch, Deathblow and Gen13. In 1996 he briefly returned to Marvel for the Heroes Reborn project, drawing Fantastic Four and plotting Iron Man. Later WildStorm published The Authority, Planetary and Alan Moore’s imprint America’s Best Comics.

The role of publisher got in the way of drawing, and in late 1998 Lee sold WildStorm to DC Comics, then ran it until it was closed in 2010. For DC he drew twelve issues of Batman (the “Hush” storyline, 2003, written by Jeph Loeb) and “Superman: For Tomorrow” (2004, written by Brian Azzarello), and in 2005 he took on All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder with Frank Miller. The series appeared with long gaps, and Lee took the blame for the delays upon himself: he was busy with the video game DC Universe Online, where in 2008 he became executive creative director.

On 18 February 2010 Lee and Dan DiDio were named co-publishers of DC Comics. In 2011, with Geoff Johns, he designed the relaunch The New 52 and drew the new Justice League. Later came Superman Unchained, Suicide Squad and covers for other projects, from his Boo Berry design for General Mills cereal boxes in 2014 to themed Kia cars. In 2018 Lee was named DC’s chief creative officer, in February 2020, after DiDio left, he became the sole publisher, and in May 2023 he became president of the company.

Among Lee’s awards are the Harvey Award for Best New Talent (1990), the Inkpot Award (1992) and three Wizard Fan Awards (1996, 2002, 2003). In 2022 readers of the website CBR placed him fourth in a list of the best comics artists.